MusicHackDay 2009
This weekend I was reppin’ NixonMcInnes at the first MusicHackDay held at the guardian offices (which were super plush!), it was an excellent, fun and tiring event. Held over Saturday and Sunday, about 150 music and computer geeks were given 24 hours to hack some cool stuff together using API’s and data from music related sites around the web. Sponsors included Last.fm, Gigulate, SoundCloud, 7Digital, BBC Music, Echo Nest, Songkick, Peoples Music Store and The Guardian. There was some amazing stuff built over the weekend ranging from cool little hardware hacks aided by the folks at tinker.it, an app that lets you share your iTunes library over the net (with syncing play so you can listen along with the owner) and tons more. All in all great fun.
The weekend started off with an introduction from the organizers and then brief introductions to each of the sponsors and their API’s. The group then broke up and some of the sponsors gave some more in depth talks about their companies and API’s, after that it was hacks-ahoy!
I spent my weekend working on a Flex/Actionscript 3 wrapper for the SouncCloud API, something that I had started about 6 months ago but never had the time to finish. Not being an Actionscript guru had hindered my progress somewhat and it was great to be able to quiz the any attendee’s who were better versed in AS3 than myself (a big thanks to John Martin of Gigulate for that). My code can be found up on Github, its a little rough around the edges but perfectly usable. I’m planning on tidying it up for use in a future app.
After a looong (caffeine fueled) night of hacking (surprising how many people were up until the wee-hours working on the particular hacks) we had breakfast, wrapped up our work then at 2pm the presentations began. There was a huge amount of projects, far more than I was expecting and we all waited eagerly to show off our own work. I cant remember all of the hack but two of my favorites were:
http://citysounds.fm/ – An app from some of the SoundCloud guys, it grabs the latest tracks off SoundCloud from cities around the world. simple but quite cool, its interesting to see how different cities vary in the styles of music that are being produced there.
MusicBore – Pulls in songs and metadata from last.fm, gets info about them from the BBC (like shows they’ve been played on) and then mashes them into a ‘radio’ program spewing the data into an IRC channel where it can then be read using a screen reader as a kind of DJ.
The coolest thing I discovered there was the Echo Nest service, you can upload a tune to it for analysis and it will give you back tons of data on it like tempo, key, volume points and changes in the track like chorus or fade outs etc. You can also process tunes, pitching them up or down or mixing them together etc. An amazing API put to some excellent use in some of the hacks, check it out over at http://developer.echonest.com/pages/overview
Something Rob Watson, one of the other attendees there had built a little while ago using Echo Nest is this piece of awesomeness: http://www.donkdj.com/ – remix your favorite track in to a scouse/bouncy house donk master peice! Give it a whirl.
You can check out all the projects over at http://musichackday.org/info/Hacks and prepare to be impressed!
A massive thanks goes out to Dave Haynes, the other organisers and sponsors for putting the weekend on, I cant wait for the next one!
Cheers to Alexander Ljung for the photo
Edward wrote this on 15.07.09 – 3 comments
It's filed in the Development, Events & conferences, Internet, Web technology box
On July 15th, 2009 at 4:26 pm, Ben Fields responded:
That’s some nice work on the as3 wrapper. More SC wrappers!
On July 15th, 2009 at 4:30 pm, Edward responded:
Hi
Thanks Ben! It should hopefully get better soon, im still missing a few bits. keep an eye on the Github repository for changes.
On July 24th, 2009 at 11:27 am, Let me present: CitySounds.fm : Henrik Berggren responded:
[...] the last days the app has been tweeted and blogged a lot and it’s great fun to see that browsing music based on location actually makes sense [...]