Hacking on the Echo Nest at the Berlin Music Hackday
Posted by Paul in code, data, events, remix, The Echo Nest, web services on September 16, 2009
The Berlin Music Hackday is nearly upon us. Ben Lacker (a.k.a. DJ API) will be representing the Echo Nest at this wonderful event. If you want to maximize your hacking time during the hackday there are a few things that you can do in advance to get ready to hack on the Echo Nest APIs:
- Get an Echo Nest API Key – If you are going to be using the API, you need to get a key. You can get one for free from: developer.echonest.com
- Read the API overview – The overview gives you a good idea of the capabilities of the API. If you are thinking of writing a remix application, be sure to read Adam Lindsay’s wonderful remix tutorial.
- Pick a client library – There are a number of client libraries for The Echo Nest – select one for your language of choice and install it.
- Think of a great application – easier said than done. If you are looking for some inspiration, checkout these examples: morecowbell, donkdj, Music Explorer FX, and Where’s the Pow? . You’ll find more examples in the Echo Nest gallery of Showcase Apps. If you are stuck for an idea ask me (paul@echonest.com) or Ben – we have a list of application ideas that we think would be fun to write.
At the end of the hackday, Ben will choose the Most Awesome Echo Nest Hackday Application. The developer of this application will go home a shiny new iPod touch. If you want your application to catch Ben’s eye write an Echo Nest application that makes someone say “woah! how did you do that!”, extra points if its an application with high viral potential. Check out the list of hacks created at the London Music Hackday to get inspiration.
The Music Hackday Comes to Boston
Posted by Paul in code, events, fun, Music, startup, The Echo Nest, web services on September 11, 2009
<W00T!> -The Music Hackday is coming to Boston. Set aside the weekend of November 21 and 22 for the Boston Music Hackday being held at the Microsoft New England Research and Develpment Center (aka NERD). The Music Hackday is a place where folks can gather for a weekend of nearly uninterrupted hacking on music. Expect to see (and hear) all kinds of music hacks: from web-hacks, iPhone apps, analog noisemakers to cool visualizations. Anything goes as long as it is music related. The Boston hackday is being organized by Dave Haynes (SoundCloud), Jon Pierce (Betahouse) and myself (The Echo Nest). We here at the Echo Nest are pretty excited to be involved. It should be really fun.
If you hack music and are going to be within a day’s drive of Boston on the weekend before Thanksgiving, you really should be planning to attend the hackday. Registration is free, but space is limited. To guarantee a spot register early and be sure you tell us how you want to hack music (because of the limited number of slots, we give preference to music hackers).
Event: Boston Music Hackday
When: November 21, 22
Where: NERD
PRICE: $FREE
Register: http://musichackdayboston.eventbrite.com/
Looking for hacking inspiration? Check out all of the music hacks that were built during the London Music Hackday:
- LonelyHarps won 7digital prize
- Music Zeitgeist won BBC prize
- iPhone Music Visualiser won The Echo Nest prize
- pythoniphication of SoundCloud API won Gigulate prize
- MusicBore won Last.fm and Be Broadband Overall prize
- trackmap won Songkick prize
- SoundCloud playlist sampler won SoundCloud prize
- Percussion Machine won RjDj and Tinker it! prize
- SpaceBass won LOLCODE prize
- TrippyAudioWaves
- Music Feeds
- Record Label Website and Data Access
- Cantarino
- Danzen Party MIX!!!
- iPhone Music Visualiser
- Pix n Mixer
- IRC Duckestra
- BotTalk
- SoundCloud AS3 Wrapper
- TwinkleStarduino
- Music Price Comparison
- Outcast
- CloudPost
- Gig news
- LONCYN
- MP3 music news blog plugin
- last.fm Events on iPhone
- SoundCloud Dropbox Manager
- MakeMyMixtape
- Bass Race RjDj Scene
- 7digital and Guardian news mashup
- YouLoop
- CitySounds.fm
- RFID objects with a taste in music
- Amenator
- Theremag
- ookoi_ShakeNRoll
- Soup.io SoundCloud import & Radio alpha
- Bass Race RjDj Scene
- JAEZZESiZER
People who shopped for baseball bats …
Posted by Paul in freakomendation, fun, recommendation on September 11, 2009
Divisible by Zero
Posted by Paul in Music, music information retrieval, research on September 9, 2009
Be sure to check out the new MIR blog Divisible by Zero by Queen Mary PhD Student Rebecca Stewart. Becky is particularly interested in using spatial audio techniques to enhance music discovery. I find her first post You want the third song on the left to be quite interesting. She’s using a spatially-enabled database to manage fast lookups of similar tracks that have been positioned in a 2D space using LDMS. This is a really neat idea. It turns a problem that can be particularly vexing into a simple SQL query.
I hope Becky will continue to write about this project in her blog. I’m particularly interested in learning how well the spatial database scales to industrial-sized music collections, what her query times are and how the LDMS/GIS similarity compare to results using a brute force nearest neighbor distance calculation on the feature vectors. – (via Ben Fields)
Finding music with pictures
Posted by Paul in Music, music information retrieval, research, visualization on September 7, 2009
As part of the collateral information for our upcoming ISMIR tutorial (Using Visualizations for Music Discovery), Justin and I have created a new blog: Visualizing Music. This blog, inspired by our favorite InfoVis blogs like Information Aesthetics and Visual Complexity, will be be a place where we catalog and critique visualizations that help people explore and understand music.
There are hundreds of music visualizations out there – so it may take us a little while to get them all cataloged, but we’ve already added some of our favorites. Help us fill out the whole catalog by sending us links to interesting music visualizations.
Check out the new blog: Visualizing Music
Auto-tune for the iPhone
According to Rebecca, it is already the in the top 5 iPhone paid apps, (and it was only released yesterday). Congrats to Rebecca and the rest of the Smule team for creating yet another really cool iPhone music app.
What’s your favorite visualization for music discovery?
Posted by Paul in Music, research, visualization on September 4, 2009
Justin and I have been working on our tutorial on using visualizations for music discovery to be presented ISMIR 2009. One part of this tutorial will be a survey of current commercial and research-oriented systems that use visualization to help people explore for and discover new music. Ultimately we hope to build a comprehensive web directory of these visualization as part of the supplementary material for the tutorial. We could use your help building this directory. If you know of an interesting visualization that is used for music discovery (or even a technique that you think *could* be used for music discovery), add a link/description in the comments on this post or send me an email at paul.lamere@gmail.com. Thanks much!
Musically Intelligent Machines
Posted by Paul in Music, music information retrieval, startup on September 2, 2009
Musically Intelligent Machines, is a spin-off of the song autotagging work done by Michael Mandel. Michael has chosen a rather awesome name for his company, combining ‘music’ and ‘machine’ into a catchy title – now why didn’t I think of that ;).
You can see Mike’s demo on this livestream here:
Click on on-demand / September 1st / Musically Intelligent Machines.
Music & Bits
Developers at Music&Bits
The music hacking events just keep on coming. On October 21st, the second Music & Bits will be held in conjunction with the Amsterdam Dance Event. Music & Bits will provide a venue for people in the music industry, bloggers, press, developers, hackers entrepreneurs and music enthusiasts to get together to focus on trends and opportunities in the online music world. Music & Bits will have two tracks – a traditional conference track with speakers and representatives from startups. and a music hacker track following the model of the music hackdays where hardware, software and music hackers can do their thing without having to listen to some PR guy talk about how he will leverage the synergies of the music 2.0. (Actually, the spring Music&Bits had some rather awesome speakers, so I expect that they’ll do the same for this event too).
Music Hack Day Berlin
Posted by Paul in code, data, Music, The Echo Nest on September 1, 2009
On the heals of the very successful London Music Hackday, comes the Berlin Music Hackday which will be held on September 18/19/20 at the very cool Radialsystem V in Berlin Germany.
Site of the Berlin Music Hacday
The hackday is totally free for participants but is limited to 150 participants. (and if this is organized like the London hackday, if you want to attend, be prepared to describe how you hack hardware, software or music – not just anyone can fill one of the 150 slots).
The London hackday was such a great event, I’m glad to see that it is being repeated in different parts of the world. Look for more Music Hackdays coming to a city near you.
Hacking music at the London Music Hackday
Music Machinery 