And the O Awards Nominees for Best Music Hack are …
I was pretty excited to learn that two of my recent music hacks have been nominated in the Best Music Hack category of the MTV O Music Awards:
Other nominees include The Leap Orchestra, Ian Rogers’s Maebe and Tweet Concrete. If you are so inclined you can head on over to the O Awards site and vote your favorite music hack.
Jennie takes over the Internet
My daughter Jennie made a hack last week at Hill Holliday‘s TVnext Hack. She won her category, and ultimately went on to win the grand prize. She got lots of prizes including multiple iPads, Rokus boxes, Apple TVs, lots of money and even Viggle Points. Eliot wrote a really nice article about how Jennie found herself at the hackathon and how she managed to win it. Since then it has been a rather crazy week for Jennie. She’s received multiple internship offers, a number of interview requests and an offer to help market her hack. Today, her story got picked up by Mother Jones which has opened the mainstream media floodgates. In the last 24 hours there have been stories in: US News and World Report, The Los Angeles Times, Huffpo, CNET, Hollywood.com, Dailydot, The AV Club, IMDB, Turnstyle, The Mary Sue (The Geek Guide to Girl Culture) and Wil Wheaton! More to come tomorrow. Yes, it is a big day for Jennie – she had her last AP Exam of high school (Calculus), she got her birthday present (an iPhone), and she was interviewed for NPR Morning Edition (expect to hear her tomorrow morning Update – it is here). Her next life goal is to get more twitter followers than her friend Andrew (@ambushsabre). It’s a lot for someone just two days shy of her 18th birthday.
(Note, Jennie has never ever seen The Empire Strikes Back).
Update: A few more stories: Today, The BBC, NBC News, The Hollywood Gossip, Buzz 60, FastCompany, Let’s get Digital
Update (May 11) – as I write this, a Good Morning America camera is filming Jennie typing on her computer. She has had recent appearances in: slashdot, Marketplace, Aljazeera, AP (Wire service), lots of foreign news sites from Romania, Sweden and France. Here’s a photo of the Good Morning America shoot:
Update: 5/12/2013 – Here’s a screengrab of the Good Morning America piece.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuTVbx_WcF4]
The Curation Station
I’ve spent the weekend on the 35th floor of a very fancy office building in the heart of Boston hacking on the TV at Hill Holliday‘s TVnext Hack. My hack is called ‘The Curation Station’. It is a tool for helping music curators pick new music for TV shows. Here’s how it works:
The curator enters the name of the the TV show – the app then uses either the Rdio or the Watchwith API to find music that has played on those shows. The curator is then brought to the curation screen where the song collection can be visualized and previewed along any of 16 Echo Nest parameters such as energy, loudness, danceability, artist hotttnesss and so on.
You can click on any particular song, inspect all of its attributes You can use this to explore the collection and to find new music that matches the mood or style of show. If you like a particular song, you can ask to see and hear more new music like that song. If you like one of the recommended songs you can save it for future use. You can try the app out here: The Curation Station
I’ve enjoyed the weekend at TVNext hack. It was a really nice event – with all the best amenities for hacking. Well done all!
A quick hack to explore gender and music
Given that it is a holiday today, I only had a short amount of coding time this morning. Still, I built something that is pretty fun to play with. It is a little tool that lets you explore gender and music. With the tool, you can search for Rdio playlists via keywords and the app will give you the gender breakdown of the matching playlist creators. For example, if you type in ‘exercise’ the tool finds the top 200 playlists with exercise in the title and gives you the gender breakdown like so:
You can use the tool to explore gender biases in music. Some examples:
- 90% of Bieber playlists are by female listeners
- 81% of heavy metal playlists are by male listeners
- 61% of love playlists are by female listeners
- 70% of driving playlists are by male listeners
- 70% of cleaning playlists are by female listeners
- 95% of coding playlists are by male (!) listeners
- 100% of Mamma Mia playlists are by female listeners
- 88% of frat playlists are by male listeners
The tool was built using the superduper Rdio API. Try the tool out here: Gender Bias in Music
Getting the Hotttest Artists in any genre with The Echo Nest API
Posted by Paul in code, The Echo Nest on March 29, 2013
If you spend a few hours listening to broadcast radio it becomes pretty evident who the most popular pop artists are. You can’t go too long before you hear a song by Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, Bruno Mars or P!nk. The hotttest pop artists get lots of airplay. But what about all the other music out there? Who are the hotttest gothic metal artists? Who are the most popular Texas blues artists? Those are the kind of questions we try to answer with today’s Echo Nest demo: The Hotttest Artists
This app lets you select from among over 400 different genres from a cappella to Zydeco and see who are the hotttest artists in that genre. The output includes a brief bio and image of the artist, and of course you can listen to any artist via Rdio. The app is an interesting way to explore all of the different genres out there and sample some different types of music. The source is available on github. The whole thing including all Javascript, html and CSS is less than 500 lines.
Try out the Hotttest Artist app and be sure to check out all of the other Echo Nest demos on our demo page.
Getting Artist News with The Echo Nest
Next up in this week of demos is The Artist News demo. This is a simple demonstration of how to get recent news articles for any of the millions of artists tracked by The Echo Nest. To get artist news, you use the artist/news API call. This call accepts the artist name or ID (an Echo Nest ID or the artist ID from any of our Rosetta partners, including Rdio, Spotify, Rhapsody, 7Digital and many more). You can also set a ‘high relevance’ flag if you want to restrict the results to only news articles that are mainly about the given artist.
The Artist News Demo is quite straightforward. Type in an artist’s name, and you’ll get the most recent news about the artist. Here’s a screenshot:
You can try out the app here: Artist News. The source is on github.
Getting Artist Images with the Echo Nest API
Posted by Paul in code, The Echo Nest on March 27, 2013
This week I’ve been writing a few web apps to demonstrate how to do stuff with The Echo Nest API. One app shows how you can use The Echo Nest API to get artist images. The app is nice and simple. Type in the name of an artist and it will show you 100 images of the artist.
The core code to get the images is here:
function fetchImages(artist) {
var url = 'http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/artist/images';
var args = {
format:'json',
api_key: 'MY-API-KEY',
name: artist,
results: 100,
};
info("Fetching images for " + artist);
$.getJSON(url, args,
function(data) {
$("#results").empty();
if (! ('images' in data.response)) {
error("Can't find any images for " + artist);
} else {
$.each(data.response.images, function(index, item) {
var div = formatItem(index, item);
$("#results").append(div);
});
}
},
function() {
error("Trouble getting blog posts for " + artist);
}
);
}
The full source is on github.
With jQuery’s getJSON call, it is quite straightforward to retrieve the list of images from The Echo Nest for formatting and display.
The most interesting bits for me was learning how to make square images regardless of the aspect ratio of the image, without distorting them. This is done with a little CSS magic. Each image div gets a class like so:
.image-container {
width: 240px;
height: 240px;
background-size: cover;
background-image:"http://example.com/url/to/image.png";
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: 50% 50%;
float:left;
}
Try out the Artist Image demo , marvel at the square images and be sure to visit the Echo Nest Demo page to see all of the other demos I’ve been posting this week.
Using speechiness to make stand-up comedy playlists
Posted by Paul in code, data, The Echo Nest on March 20, 2013
One of the Echo Nest attributes calculated for every song is ‘speechiness’. This is an estimate of the amount of spoken word in a particular track. High values indicate that there’s a good deal of speech in the track, and low values indicate that there is very little speech. This attribute can be used to help create interesting playlists. For example, a music service like Spotify has hundreds of stand-up comedy albums in their collection. If you wanted to use the Echo Nest API to create a playlist of these routines you could create an artist-description playlist with a call like so:
However, this call wouldn’t generate the playlist that you want. Intermixed with stand-up routines would be comedy musical numbers by Tenacious D, The Lonely Island or “Weird Al”. That’s where the ‘speechiness’ attribute comes in. We can add a speechiness filter to our playlist call to give us spoken-word comedy tracks like so:
It is a pretty effective way to generate comedy playlists.
I made a demo app that shows this called The Comedy Playlister. It generates a Spotify playlist of comedy routines.
It does a pretty good job of finding comedy. Now I just need some way of filtering out Larry The Cable Guy. The app is on line here: The Comedy Playlister. The source is on github.
ArtistX – the artist explorer
There’s no hackathon this weekend, but that’s no excuse not to write some code. I’ve been wanting to experiment with amcharts, a Javascript charting package so I wrote a web app that shows lots of charts and graphs for artists. The app is ArtistX. It is an artist explorer that lets you look at all of the Echo Nest song parameters for any artist. For instance, you can look at the Energy Distribution of songs by Weezer:
Energy Distribution of Songs By Weezer
You can look at the tempo distribution of songs by The Rolling Stones:
Tempo Distribution for the Rolling Stones
Or you can look at scatter plots that show 4 attributes at once (X, Y, size and color). Here’s a plot of all of Muse’s songs showing the energy, loudness, hotttnesss and liveness:
Scatter plot for Muse
You can interact with the plots – click on a bar or point in a plot to listen to songs (via Rdio).
The app lets you explore across 11 different song parameters: energy, loudness, danceability, liveness, speechiness, hotttnesss, tempo, duration, key, time signature and mode. You can use the app to find all sorts of interesting things. Want to listen all the stage patter for an artist? Create scatter plot for the artist with liveness and speechiness as the X, Y parameters. The songs in the upper right-hand corner of the plot will be the ones you are looking for. Try it with an artist like Elvis Presley or Dean Martin.
Give the app a spin here: ArtistX. The source is at github/echonest/ArtistX
The Artist’s Hack
Sunday at SXSW was the Artist’s Hack – where passionate developers from around the world gathered to build cool stuff. Artist’s Hack was organized by Backplane and Spotify and is dedicated to building the future of music, art, video and collaborative though on the web and mobile during SXSW.
The hack was held at Raptor House – a short walk from downtown Austin. There was plenty of bandwidth, good food and beverages for the 8 hour hackathon. APIs were in abundance: Spotify, The Echo Nest, SendGrid, Twilio, Youtube, Klout, Paypal, Gimbal, SeatGeek, Aviary, Etsy, Topspin, Chute, Dropbox, Music Dealers and others were all there in force offering their technology for hackers to use.
Hackers built around 20 hacks during the event. Some of my favorites are:
- biomuse – creates playlists based upon your biometrics. This was built on top of the biobeats platform. Quite neat stuff. Winner of one of the Echo Nest prizes.
- Jamblot – visualize your song history in a creative way to commemorate any period of your life that affected your music choice. Jamblot draws your song history for you. Winner of one of the Echo Nest prizes.
- Party Together – ambient automatic shared playlists for your party. Winner of one of the Echo Nest prizes.
- We browse in public – Stream all of your browser activity live to others. Chat with others based on their activity.
- Bundio – Monetize dropbox.
My hack is A longer life for post-rock fans. This was my first time using the Twilio API. It was a lot of fun to build. The Twilio API and whole developer experience is awesome. Any company with an API should try to emulate what Twilio does.
One novel aspect of the event was that Cory Booker was one of the judges. Here he is watching Danny Kirschner give the Bundio demo
Cory is a pro – when there was a power outage that delayed some of the demos, Cory conducted an impromptu ‘interview’ with one of the founders of Backplane while the crew scurried to restore the power.
All in all, the Artist’s Hack was great fun, with lots of creative hacks. Well done Spotify and Backplane!
Music Machinery 