Hypeify – a music tech company name generator
BennetK‘s 30 minute hack from the Boston Music Hack Day is a music company name generator:
I want a company named CloudCore.
Things I learned about organizing a hack day
Posted by Paul in events, Music, The Echo Nest on November 24, 2009
Boston Music Hack Day is in the can. I learned a lot over the last few days about what happens when you have 200+ programmers gather for a weekend. Here’s some of the things I want to remember for next time:
- Plan for no-shows – when the event is free, there will be some people who sign up, but then, for whatever reason will not show up. We had lots of people on the waiting list that could have attended if we had anticipated the no-shows.
No-shows should be sitting in these empty seats
- Buy Less Food – When people are up all night coding, they tend to skip breakfast. We had breakfast for 250 on Sunday, we probably only needed breakfast for 100.
- Late-night hacking with beer and music can be quite productive
Late-night hacking at the Hack Nest
- Have dueling projectors – when you have 35 demos to show, plug in time can add a half hour to a 2 hour demo session. (By the way, thanks to the good Samaritan ubergeek who volunteered to help the presenters get the video (someone tell me who it was)).
- Work with awesome people – Working Jon and Dave was great, but there was also an incredible behind-the-scenes team making the Hack Day possible. We had an awesome set of volunteers who gave their weekend to making the hack day possible. Here are some of them:
See the guy in the back with the cap? That’s Matthew Santiago – he was a non-stop hack day machine – from moving food for 300, organizing registration, handling and chauffeuring the Echo Nestival talent. He worked from 7AM Saturday morning to 7PM Sunday evening with about an hour of sleep.
The secret weapon of the hack day was Elissa – Director of Stuff at the Echo Nest- she managed so many details from booking the Echo Nestival, renting vans, carting food, finding volunteers, photoshopping badges, getting tee-shirts made, dealing with press, photographers, CEOs, and Founders, ordering tables and chairs for the Hack nest, wrangling sponsors, picking menus, ordering food, getting swag, making extra bathroom keys, hand delivering the excess food to the local homeless shelter and so much more. Elissa quietly managed all of the big and little details that I never would have thought of. If you attended the hack day, be sure to give her some twitter love.
I learned a lot over the weekend about events and organizing. I hope I get to be involved in more hack days in the future so I can use my new knowledge.
Photos by Dave Haynes
Searching for beauty and surprise in popular music
Posted by Paul in events, Music, The Echo Nest on November 23, 2009
During the Boston Music Hack Day, 30 or 40 music hacks were produced. One phenomenal hack was Rob Ochshorn’s Outlier FM. Rob’s goal for the weekend was to utilize technology to search for beauty and surprise in even the most overproduced popular music. He approached this problem by searching musical content for the audio that “exists outside of a song’s constructed and statistical conventions”.
With Outlier FM rob can deconstruct a song into musical atoms, filter away the most common elements, leaving behind the non-conformist bits of music. This yields strange, unpredictable minimal techno-sounding music.
So how does it work? Well, first Outlier FM uses the Echo Nest analyzer to break a song down into the smallest segments. You can then visualize these segments using numerous filters and layout schemes to give you an idea of what the unusual audio segments are:
Next, you can filter out clusters of self-similar segments, leaving just the outliers:
Finally you can order, visualize and render that segments to yield interesting music:
Here’s an example of Outlier FM applied to Here’ Comes the Sun:
Rob’s hack was an amazing weekend effort, he combined music analysis and visualization into a tool that can be used to make interesting sounds. Outlier.fm was voted the best hack for the music hack day weekend. Rob chose as his prize the Sun Ultra 24 workstation with flat panel display donated by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. Here’s Rob receiving his prize from Sun.
Congrats to Rob for a well done hack!
Paul’s Music Wreckommender
Posted by Paul in events, Music, playlist, The Echo Nest on November 22, 2009
I just posted my music hack day hack. It is called Paul’s Music Wreckommender. Use this Wreckommender to find anti-recommendations. Give the wreckommender an artist that you like and it will give you a playlist of tracks from artists that are very different from the seed artist. Some obvious use cases:
- Your 14 year old daughter’s slumber party is getting too loud. Send the girls home by putting on the Hannah Montana Wreckommender – which yields a playlist with tracks by Glenn Gould, Dream Theater and Al Hirt.
- It’s time to break up with your girl friend. Give her the ‘You are the wind beneath my wings‘ wrecklist and your intentions will be clear.
- If you like ‘everything but country’ then Garth Williams will guide the way: Garth Williams Wreckommendations
You can try it out at Wreckommender.com.
How it works:
This was a pretty easy hack. I already had a playlister engine with some neat properties. It maintains a complete artist graph using Echo Nest artist similarities, so I can make make routes through the artist space for making smooth artist/song transitions. Adapting this playlister engine to create wreckommendations was really easy. To create the recommendations, I find the seed node in the graph and then from this node I find the set of artists that have the longest ‘shortest path’ to the seed artist. These are the artists that are furthest away from the seed artists. I then select songs from this set to make my ‘wrecklist’. However, this list isn’t the best list. There are a small set of artists that are far away from everything. These artists become frequent wrecommendations for many many artists, which is bad. To avoid this problem I adapted the algorithm to find far away artist clusters and then draw artists from that cluster. This gives yields a playlist with much more variety.
This hack is primarily for fun, but I think there’s something in the wreckommendations that is worth persuing. When asked to describe their taste in music, many people will use a negative – such as “Anything but country and rap”. If this is really the case, then using the wreckommender to literally find ‘anything but country and rap’ – whether it is J-Pop or crabcore might actually be useful.
Inspiration
A couple of sources of inspiration for this hack. First, the name. A word like ‘wreckommendation’ clearly deserves an application. Second, a coffee pot conversation with Reid, and finally, the LibraryThing Unsuggester, which does a similar thing for books (but in a very different way).
I hope you like the wreckommender, let me know if you find any interesting wreckommendations.
My view from the Hack Nest
Posted by Paul in Music, The Echo Nest on November 22, 2009
Music Hack Day hacking continues at the Hack Nest. Here’s my view in the Playdar room: Tobyp, RJ, jwheare and the fingers of jherskowitz
Boston Music Hack Day
Posted by Paul in events, The Echo Nest on November 21, 2009
Boston at dawn -ready for the hack day
Breakfast at the music hack day
Hardware hacking at the Boston Music Hack Day
Hardcore hacking at the Boston Music Hack day
The two faces of music discovery
Turning an altoids can into a musical instrumentation
The Echo Nest gets ready for Boston Music Hack Day
Posted by Paul in code, java, Music, The Echo Nest, web services on November 19, 2009
We’ve been extremely busy this week at the Echo Nest getting ready for the Boston Music Hack Day. Not only have we been figuring out menus, panel room assignments, and dealing with a waitlist, we’ve also been releasing a set of new API features. Here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve done:
- get_images – a frequent request from developers – we now have an API method that will let you get images for an artist. Note that we are releasing this method as a sneak preview for the hack day – we have images for over 60 thousand artists, but we will be aggressively adding more images over the next few weeks (60 thousand artists is a lot of artists, but we’d like to have lots more). We’ll also be expanding our sources of images to include many more sources. The results of the get_images are already good. 95% of the time you’ll get images. Over the next few weeks, the results will get even better.
- get_biographies – another frequent request from developers – we now have a get_biographies API method that will return a set of artist biographies for any artist. We currently have biographies for about a quarter million artists – and just as with get_images – we are working hard to expand the breadth and depth of this coverage. Nevertheless, with coverage for a quarter million artists, 99.99% of the time when you ask for a biography we’ll have it.
- get_similar – we’ve expanded the number of similar artists you can get back from get_similar from 15 to 100. This gives you lots more info for building playlisting and music discovery apps.
- buckets – one issue that our developers have had was that to fill out info on an artist often took a number of calls to the Echo Nest – one to get similars, one to get audio, one for video, familiarity, hotttnesss etc. To fill out an artist page it could take half a dozen calls. To reduce the number of calls needed to get artist information we’ve added a ‘bucket’ parameter to the search_artist, the get_similar and the get_profile calls. The bucket parameter allows you to specify which additional artist info should be returned in the call. You can specify ‘audio,’ ‘biographies,’ ‘blogs,’ ‘familiarity,’ ‘hotttnesss,’ ‘news,’ ‘reviews,’ ‘urls,’, ‘images’ or ‘video’ and whenever you get artist data back you’ll get the specified info included. For example with the call:
http://developer.echonest.com/api/get_profile ?api_key=EHY4JJEGIOFA1RCJP &id=music://id.echonest.com/~/AR/ARH6W4X1187B99274F &version=3 &bucket=familiarity &bucket=hotttnessswill return an artist block that looks like this:
<artist> <name>Radiohead</name> <id>music://id.echonest.com/~/AR/ARH6W4X1187B99274F</id> <familiarity>0.899230928024</familiarity> <hotttnesss>0.847409181874</hotttnesss> </artist>
There’s another new feature that we are starting to roll out. It’s called Echo Source – it allows the developer to get content (such as images, audio, video etc.) based upon license info. Echo Source is a big deal and deserves a whole post – but that’s going to have to wait until after Music Hack Day. Suffice it to say that with Echo Source you’ll have a new level of control over what content the Echo Nest API returns.
We’ve updated our Java and Python libraries to support the new calls. So grab yourself an API key and start writing some music apps.
Music Machinery 