The Logos of Music 2.0 vs Logos of Music APIs 2013
Way back in 2006 Jadam Kahn (aka @rocketsurgeon) created this collage of Music 2.0 logos.
Compare that to the Music APIs of 2013 logos:
There’s almost no overlap. Even the iTunes icon changed color. Thank goodness for the steady hand of MusicBrainz keeping things together for so long.
The Ultimate List of Music APIs
Posted by Paul in code, Music, The Echo Nest, web services on October 24, 2013
I’ve started to build the ultimate list of music APIs. My goal for the list is for it to be a one-stop spot to find the best music apis. Currently 65 APIs are listed across 10 categories. Check out the list here: Music APIs
Music Hack Day NYC
Posted by Paul in code, events, fun, hacking, Music, music hack day, The Echo Nest on October 21, 2013
Music Hack Day NYC has just wrapped up, and what a great weekend it was!. Hosted at Spotify’s spiffy new headquarters in midtown, Music Hack Day NYC was the place to be if you are passionate music, technology and building stuff. During all night Friday and all day Saturday, hundreds of hackers used music APIs from companies like The Echo Nest, Soundcloud, Gracenote, Rdio and of course Spotify, to build next generation music apps.
It was a really fun event. The Spotify headquarters are perfect for hacking. Flawless and apparently limitless wifi/bandwidth, awesome A/V setup, and great sound for an unending social hacking playlist.
Over the course of about 20 hours of hacking, 36 hacks were built and demoed. There was quite a range of inventive hacks. Some of my favorites:
EERFY
The crowd favorite was Oscar Celma’s extremely clever EERFY – He solved the Music Industry Problem in 24 hours by turning it upside down with EERFY:
halfstep
Another favorite was Leo and Jason’s halfstep – a chrome extension that motivates you to move more. How? If you only moved 20% of your movement goal yesterday, then halfstep will also let you listen to first 20% of any songs today. Check out the screencast of their hack.
PartyOutlook
There were lots of great Echo Nest hacks including the Echo Nest prize winner partyOutlook by Matt Egan. PartyOutlook is a CocoaLibSpotify powered iPad jukebox that accepts tracks via the Twillio API and displays real-time information about the life of the party using Echo Nest song data. Allows an administrator to pause and play music, as well as skip tracks.
TuneTravelr
Another really neat Echo Nest hack was TuneTravelr created by Chris Evans and Joshua Boggs. Tune Travelr is a web app that takes cities and locales a well as a time period and returns a playlist of songs that were hot at the time. It uses the Echo Nest data to leverage some analytic querying, before pipping the results into Rdio’s web API for playback.
MoodVenue
MoodVenue used The Echo Nest API to help find out what’s going on tonight based on your mood and location.
Repetition faceoff
Artists fight to the death, using only the sheer repetitive force of their music! By Brian McFee. Brian used the Echo Nest analysis data to build a custom metric for repetition for any song and used that to score songs by the artist for the face-off.
Cheese Tray
A novel use of The Echo Nest API was Cheese Tray – A Spotify app that takes selects randomly from among your Spotify playlists and analyzes it. It then adds to that playlist a song that best represents the average attributes of the playlist, as given by The Echo Nest API. Then, via SMS through the Twilio service, it sends a command to your Android device that changes its background to the album artwork for that average song.
Songs About
Uses wikipedia articles titled ‘List of songs about…” to generate Spotify/Rdio playlists about different subjects/places. Songs about used The Echo Nest’s Rosetta Stone to get the song IDs for playing in Spotify and Rdio.
Awesome Chart Explorer
This is my hack. A visualization that lets you explore and listen to 50 years of Billboard charts.
ccRex
Upload a song, ccRex’ll fetch Creative Commons music to match using Echo Nest song attributes to determine the best match.
Other nifty Echo Nest hacks:
- opporTUNE – context dependent playlisting based upon weather, activity, location, time of day and your favorite genres
- crowdPlay – an SMS enabled party playlister
- BPM Reader – an app that updates a playlist in real-time based on user keyboard input correlated to BPM. Tap in your beat, and generate a playlist of songs with that rhythm.
- Moody calls – Get a phone call with a song that matches your mood
- Spotify V. Rdio -Pitting the two music platforms against each other using your listening history
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- Perl client for the Echo Nest – Ajax built a library that provides support for nearly all of The Echo Nest API features.
All in all, it was a great event with lots of awesome, innovative hacks and lots of smart people. A good time was had by all. Thanks to Spotify and @mager for organizing the event. Well Done!
The Awesome Chart Explorer
Posted by Paul in code, fun, hacking, Music, music hack day, The Echo Nest on October 19, 2013
I just finished coding up my Music Hack Day NYC hack called The Awesome Chart Explorer. It’s a web app that combines Billboard and Echo Nest data into a visual wonderland. (yes, I’m a little tired). Check it out here. Almost time to give the demo, so more about the tech behind the hack later on.
Interactive Music – Richer
Here’s a nifty web-based music experience created by Dutch Gramophone (aka Yotam Mann). It’s an interactive song about working and employment where you have to do work to hear the richest version of the track.
To hear the song, you add virtual pennies to the penny jar. The fuller the penny jar, the richer the music. This is similar in concept to wemakeawesomesh.it’s 18 months where you had to dance to hear Calvin Harris’s new album, but takes it a step further by automatically expanding and contracting the instrumentation of the music. The result is that everyone hears a different version of the song. It is a neat idea and very well executed with intriguing images drawn by Sarah Rothberg. Check it out: Richer
Music Hack Day Chicago
The first ever Music Hack Day Chicago was held this past weekend. It was hosted in the best hacking space ever: Blue 1647 – there was plenty of bandwidth, power, food, hacking fuel and unending music to keep us hacking all weekend. I was quite impressed with the technical chops and the creativity of those in attendance. There was an unusually high ratio of novel hacks at this event – and many had a very high degree of technical difficultly – so Well Done Chicago! Here are some of my favorite hacks:
modeshifter – by Hannah Roberston – Hannah’s goal is to build an automatic mode shifter that will take a song and generate a new version of it in a major (or minor) key. Here’s an example of the goal:
Hannah’s added an extra degree of difficulty by doing this all in Javascript, in the browser. It’s quite an ambitious undertaking. She completed the first part of her hack – extracting the fundamental frequencies via a comb filter. Next step (in a future hack day) is to shift the frequencies and add them back in. I’m looking forward to hearing the results.
jambox – by Marcell Purham – This is my favorite kind of hack. Marcell is a student at nearby University of Illinois. Marcell had never used a music API before, but in the 24 hour hackathon, was able to use The Echo Nest and the Rdio APIs to build a nifty music discovery app that runs on web (including the Mobile Web). Marcell won the Rdio prize for his efforts.
Sectionizer – by Nathan Leiby – Winner of The Echo Nest prize – For this hack Nathan took a close look at how a song can be automatically broken up into labelled sections such as intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus and outro.
Using visualizations and heuristics, Nathan was able to identify section boundaries accurately across a wide range of songs.
GearSpotting – by the Reverb Hacking team – This hack lets you tag your favorite videos with the gear the artists are using, then find out what it’s worth in the Reverb PriceGuide, or buy similar items on Reverb.
Molecular Dynamics Sonification – by Josiah Zayner – Molecular Dynamics is the process of creating a 3D simulation of physical processes on the nanoscale. Scientists use this to predict how proteins, DNA and other macromolecules function. The data generated by these simulations is massive, highly multi-dimensional and very difficult to comprehend. By analyzing simulations and sonifying the different types of data (changes is secondary structure, radius of gyration and root mean square deviation) this hack creates a way to both auditorilly and visually experience the data to provide a much higher level of comprehension.
Record Store Day – by @mattdennewitz. – creates a database of record stores from the Record Store Day website. Its a nifty bit of open source code, – the ultimate goal is to make it easy to embed record store information directly into Pitchfork reviews:
Music Popcorn – this is my hack – Music Popcorn is a music exploration tool that allows you to explore the world of music via the many hundreds of music genres. Genres are grouped into higher level families and are sized based upon their overall popularity.
Grooveshark Mobile player is horribly insecure
It is incredibly easy to rip streams onto mp3 files with the new htm5.grooveshark.com player. Start playing a song, then open your browser developer console, hit the network tab, right click on the stream.php, copy as curl, paste into a terminal window and you’ve got yourself a 64bit mono mp3 of the song.
If you try these shenanigans with Rdio, you get a 403 Forbidden error. The Grooveshark is wide open. It’s a music free for all. How can Grooveshark still get away with this stuff?
Music Popcorn – A visualization of the music genre space
My Music Hack Day Chicago music hack is Music Popcorn. It is a visualization of the music space that lets you explore and learn about the many different music genres.
Yes, this is well trod territory. Glenn’s Every Noise at Once is the destination app for this sort of thing, and I’ve had a number of quasi-successful attempts at this as well (the map of music styles, and the labyrinth of genre). Still, I think it is an interesting problem that has not been totally solved yet. This time I wanted to explore a few different aspects. In particular, I wanted to incorporate some notion of genre hierarchy. So unlike the aforementioned attempts, Music Popcorn places each genre into one of 15 or so high level genre families. This helps to bring an overall structure to the space. All the rock genres are close together, and all the metal genres are close together, and they are far away from the country genres.
I also wanted to incorporate a notion of popularity in the visualization. I didn’t want a fringe genre like djent or oi to have the same visual prominence as genre like rock or pop. So I’ve sized each genre in proportion to its overall popularity. Coupled with the clustering based on families it is easy to get a quick overview of how prominent a genre family like metal is when compared to another genre like pop or rock.
The music genre space is quite complex. Genres don’t have hard and fast borders. In order to show the fuzziness of the borders, when you click on any particular genre I show all the related genres and rearrange the map so that the related genres are closer to the selected genre. And of course you need to be able to listen to a genre, which you can do by clicking on it. Music is streamed via Rdio.
To build this app, I used The Echo Nest API to supply the genres (nearly 800 of them) and the genre-radio playlisting with Rdio. The visualization is driven by the amazing d3.
It’s been fun building this hack in Chicago. Give it a try and let me know what you think: Music Popcorn
Letsdance.to
Stop playing with iOS7 and check out LetsDance.to. It synchronizes music and dance videos to give you endless pleasure by juxtaposing the music from one video with the dancing of another. Synchronization is aided by The Echo Nest API. It is really fun. Check out this strange and mystical dance to Lorde’s Royals.
The worst kind of tweet to read after giving a talk …
I was giving a talk last week at the Boston Music Tech Meetup about hacking on music. I was showing some of my recent music hacks, one of which is the Saddest Stylophone – a web app that generates a Stylophone auto accompaniment to any song.
In my build-up for the demo I think I described the stylophone as “the worst sounding musical instrument in the world”. The demo went well, and the audience had a few good laughs at the stylophone’s expense. All good, until after my talk when I saw this tweet appear on my feed:
Wah?
I never would have imagined that there was such as thing as stylophone devotees, nor that I would one day offend the premier drone ambient stylophone composer. But, then again, I was in Cambridge MA, where no niche is too fringe. I was worried that I had gravely offended someone. I was steeling myself for an awkward conversation, but it turns out I had nothing to fear. The premier drone ambient stylophone composer was Rev. Johnny Healy (i.e. the tweeter), and he was not offended but was just giving me a good natured ribbing. He really is, however, the premier drone ambient stylophone composer. And he can make that “worst sounding instrument in the world” sound really interesting. Here is some of his work:
Music Machinery 