Posts Tagged hackday
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 most music tech ever squeezed into 1 weekend
Posted by Paul in events, Music, The Echo Nest on November 18, 2009
Workshops! The core activity for the music hack day weekend is hacking. But before we dive into the hard core hacking the weekend starts with a set of music tech workshops where hackers can learn about the latest in music technologies – it’s a way for the hacker to add more tools to their toolbox. On Saturday morning we will be conducting around 25 workshops running in 5 sessions of 5 parallel tracks. Anyone interested in the music+technology space will likely find something interesting – music recommendation, concert/event data, music meta-data, iPhone programming, electronic instrument construction, Playdar, NPR – everything from how to author a song for the Rock Band Network to the Yahoo! query language. If you are going to the Hack Day, you may want to do a little bit of planning to help you decide which of the workshops you’ll want to attend, so check out the workshop schedule.
Music Hack Day T-shirt
Posted by Paul in events, fun, The Echo Nest on November 17, 2009
Ben Lacker shows off the Boston Music Hack day tee-shirt – hot off the loom.
Build one of these at Boston Music Hack Day
Noah Vawter will be holding a workshop during the Boston Music Hack Day where you can learn how to build a working prototype Exertion Instrument. It is unclear at this time if a leekspin lesson his included. Details on the Exertion Instrument site.
Who’s going to Boston Music Hackday?
Posted by Paul in events, fun, Music, The Echo Nest, web services on October 21, 2009
Look at all the companies and organizations going to Music Hack Day.
The Echo Nest
SoundCloud
Indaba MusicHarmonix
Amie Street
8tracks
Playdar
Bandsintown
Tourfilter
NPR
Boxee
Sonos
Aviary
Conduit Labs
Topspin Media
Noteflight
Dorkbot
Libre.fm
It promises to be a really fun weekend. If you are interested in hacking music and working with the folks that are building the celestial jukebox make sure you sign up, slots are going fast. There’s one guy I’d 
to get to come to the hack day. I’m sure he’d be fascinated with all that goes on.
SoundEchoCloudNest
Posted by Paul in code, data, events, Music, The Echo Nest, web services on September 28, 2009
At the recent Berlin Music Hackday, developer Hannes Tydén developed a mashup between SoundCloud and The Echo Nest, dubbed SoundCloudEchoNest. The program uses the SoundCloud and Echo Nest APIs to automatically annotate your SoundCloud tracks with information such as when the track fades in and fades out, the key, the mode, the overall loudness, time signature and the tempo. Also each Echo Nest section is marked. Here’s an example:
This track is annotated as follows:
- echonest:start_of_fade_out=182.34
- echonest:mode=min
- echonest:loudness=-5.521
- echonest:end_of_fade_in=0.0
- echonest:time_signature=1
- echonest:tempo=96.72
- echonest:key=F#
Additionally, 9 section boundaries are annotated.
The user interface to SoundEchoCloudNest is refreshly simple, no GUIs for Hannes:
Hannes has open sourced his code on github, so if you are a Ruby programmer and want to play around with SoundCloud and/or the Echo Nest, check out the code.
Machine tagging of content is becoming more viable. Photos on Flicker can be automatically tagged with information about the camera and exposure settings, geolocation, time of day and so on. Now with APIs like SoundCloud and the Echo Nest, I think we’ll start to see similar machine tagging of music, where basic info such as tempo, key, mode, loudness can be automatically attached to the audio. This will open the doors for all sorts of tools to help us better organize our music.
Tour of the Music Hackday Boston site
Posted by Paul in code, events, fun, Music, The Echo Nest, web services on September 24, 2009
The Boston Music Hackday is being held at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center (aka The NERD). Jon, Elissa and I took a tour of the space on Tuesday, and I must say I was very impressed. The place is tailor made for hacking. There’s open space big enough for 300 hackers to gather to show their demos, there’s plenty of informal space for hacking, there are small and large conference rooms for break out sessions, there’s wireless, there are plenty of power outlets, kitchen facilities, soda coolers and great views of Boston. This space is being donated by Microsoft – and I must say that my opinion of Microsoft has gone up substantially after I’ve seen how generous they’ve been with the space. Plus, the space is simply beautiful.
Informal hacking space at the NERD
More hacking space at the NERD
This hackday is shaping up to be something special. I’m pretty sure that we’ll hit our 300 person capacity, so register soon if you want to guarantee a spot.
Hacking space at the NERD
Open space at the NERD
Meeting space at the NERD
Boston view from the NERD
More hacking and chilling for the Hackday
Berlin Music Hackday presentation videos
There are a bunch of videos of presentations and demos from the Music Hackday berlin: http://qik.com/digitalwaveriding:
Photos from Berlin Music Hackday
Posted by Paul in code, events, The Echo Nest on September 19, 2009
"I am a jelly roll"
There are some nifty photos coming of the the Berlin Music Hackday. Here’s a slide show.
Music Machinery 