Music Hack Day London

UPDATED 2 (links fixed, apps added):

Another Music Hack Day (London) was held this past weekend. Below are the hacks:

• Paul G music-on-hold hack (call his conference number and select the music you want to hear
• Cuttle (access music library on iDevice under iOS 4, and run a live remix using realtime beat tracker)
• Big Piano (inspired by the movie Big - big floor piano that you can make music with)
• Future of music 2010 (a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to be listening to anymore based on your preferences, and then deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive)
• Gramophone (browse around the world, pick a month from history and find songs that were played live then and there)
• HOTTTABS (crawls the web for you and retrieve the guitar tabs of the hottests songs of the moment according to their level of difficulty)
• BumbleTab patient guitar tutor (a very patient guitar tutor)
• Daily Sample Set (ruby script that pulls the hottest downloadable uncompressed Creative Commons tracks from SoundCloud within last 24 hours)
• Piracy (android app that allows you to drop tracks from your music collection on your current location, allowing others to grab them if they're close enough)
• Playlistr (imports/exports XSPF playlists, imports tracklists from the BBC Programmes website, links to stream on Spotify and buy from 7digital)
• Disco Snake (play the classic game snake, but you have multiple pieces of food available at any time, and eating a piece of food adds a note to a playing sequence with a pitch and velocity corresponding to the position of the food, and crashing in to your tail results in switching to a new set of samples)
• Singalong (quick access to tablature from your favorite bands)
• Speakatron (a program that looks at you through your web cam and plays a sound when you open your mouth)
• The Cut Liberator (a python script to autogenerate cut up hip hop mixes)
• Roomba Recon (The inspiration for this project is a robot solving a maze. Or cleaning a house. The general idea is to construct coherent playlists that traverse from a start to end song on the Soundcloud with minimal prior knowledge.)
• Webloop_Revisited (The webloop, in its first incarnation remotely presented at music hack day STHLM, is an ongoing experiment in using modern browsers to generate sound. On one hand. On the other hand it tries to find ways to allow people to collaboratively create music.)
• Earth Destroyers (For my London Music Hackday hack I built a web app called 'Earth Destroyers'. Give Earth Destroyers a band name and it will show you how eco-friendly the band's touring schedule is. Earth Destroyers calculates the total distance traveled from the first gig to the last along with the average distance between shows. If an artist has an average inter-show distance of greater than a 1,000 km I consider it an 'Earth Destroyer'. The app also shows you a Google map so you can see just how inefficient the tour is.)
• 7digital Never-ending Popquiz ("Arcade style" never-ending popquiz. Reaching next level will bring new type of questions and they get more difficult with each level. Wrong answers cost you lives. You can choose different genres to play and questions are generated randomly from top artists tagged with this genre. Options for answers are generated from similar artists to the correct answer.)
• 7x7 (a square of 7x7 notes, where the notes can be selected by using the mouse. All notes within the selected rectangle are played, creating various chords. When notes are selected they are played according to an Attack-Duration-Decay envelope, where the user has no control of the parameters.)
• MixCloudPad (a sit back way of enjoying MixCloud content on your iPad)
• MashBox (The user selects a track and the system mixes it with another that is chosen at random (within limits), and uploads to http://soundcloud.com/mashbox)
• SongkickGiglister (An Android oriented Songkick gig lister for people who agree to go to gigs before they've heard the band. Fetches the upcoming gigs for a given user, pulling in data about the bands: links to Spotify, tracks from around the web etc.)
• Accessible music (This hack is a web browser where songs are triggered with mouse over movements)
• MuseScore OSC Remote (several musicians scoring together)
• I was there (tour t-shirts from your Songkick gigography)
• Gowalla for SoundCloud (check in with Gowalla to a particular venue and get a free SoundCloud stream/download)
• Cleversounds (next time you visit a place with a cleversounds jukebox (at the moment, just laptops), you will be played artists that you like)
• Music Mag (create a music magazine from Guardian content)
• The Sound of Tweets (simple web app to turn tweets into pieces of music)
• Swearaoke (this is a game where you play Guitar Hero guitar, and this makes the words to a song)
• Auto Score Tubing (YouTube.com is stuffed with great musical performances. Imagine these videos playing along with the musical score! While manually synchronizing a score measure per measure along with the video is possible, automatic synchronizing would be even greater.)
• The Sound of Data About Justin Bieber (exploring how fan data could be presented not as visualizations, but instead as sounds)
• Political Echonalysis (exploring the style of politcal speech by analysing the audio data)
• Not That Song (add songs from your 7digital locker to playlist that tells you how well those tracks fit together, or not)
• Head Tracking Sound Installation (breakout Game with Procedurally Generated Audio - actions in the game affect the audio output)
• BBC Dance & Electronica Archive & Recommendations (tracklist archives for all dance & electronica shows, finds listed tracks on SoundCloud, after entering your Last.FM username, it recommends artists based on the _complete_ tracklist)
• Mortal Songbat (a musical version of Mortal Kombat)
• Radio Map (sweeping the frequency spectrum on an old analogue radio to the digital web-radio world)
• SoundWheel (Sound Wheel is a circular synthesizer that uses synesthesia and variable intonation to make funky sounding basslines)
• Chatter-FM (call a number and leave a message that will be uploaded to soundcloud)
• Nirtous Oxide (webcam midi controller that tracks colours / fruits)

It's inspiring to see what can be developed in a weekend - congrats to all! While I haven't experimented with any of the above hacks, based on the brief summaries they've provided, my favorites are Disco Snake, Earth Destroyers, I was there, Gowalla for SoundCloud and Mortal Songbat. Btw, if you are not familiar with Music Hack Day, watch these two videos:

The Rise of Michael Jackson's Popularity

Its been one year since Michael Jackson's untimely and tragic death, and his music and estate (i.e. licensing, publishing, merchandise, etc.) has generated close to $1 Billion in the last year alone, but does that make him more popular and influential than the Beatles or Elvis as this article seems to suggest.

It's impossible to say at this point-in-time, as popularity increases and decreases longitudinally according to sociocultural conditions and market demands, among other factors and thus, popularity and influence must be measured overtime, and one year's worth of data is not sufficient for drawing conclusions, nor making comparisons.

Regardless, it is fitting to pay homage to the King of Pop today, as there's no doubt that he is one of the most influential artists and cultural icons, and his seminal music will endure for generations to come.

How Does Social Influence Effect Music Discovery?

Yesterday Bob Lefsetz wrote about the challenges of getting people to pay attention to your music. While he's correct that music recommendation and discovery is difficult, partly due to the increased amount of music content (i.e. signal-to-noise), democratically filtering out which songs and artists are the rising ones based on quantifiable and qualifiable information will require technology. For example, The Hype Machine does this well by mining the blogosphere and Twitter. The question is, will a human element remain necessary to the process? If so, what does that look like? Who are the social gatekeepers? Does their influence on an artist's popularity help or hinder music discovery? How are the social gatekeepers determined?

Seemingly, it's too early to see how social influence will impact music discovery, but I'd like to hear what artists, managers, labels and the like think by contributing to this post with their thoughts.

Psychology Professor to Examine Relationship Between Music and Emotions Using Moodagent

In what will surely be a fascinating study, Dr. David Echevarria, professor of psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi is planning to use Moodagent to examine the impact of music on emotions. “I’m hoping to use Moodagent as a teaching tool to stimulate conversation, learning and critical thinking in the area of emotions and psychology,” said Echevarria. “As a psychologist, I am fascinated that a mobile application that can discern subtle and elusive emotional qualities in music. There are some individuals with various disorders who find this an extremely challenging – if not impossible – task, and here we have a app that can do it! Moodagent is essentially a form of artificial social intelligence.”

According to Moodagent's press release, "it has long been known that music can either positively or negatively affect a person’s mood, state of happiness or stress level. Many people often turn to their favorite music to help themselves feel better, happier and more relaxed when they are feeling down or stressed, which can in turn affect mood-enhancing neurochemicals. For example, listening to music that normally makes one happy and promotes feelings of relaxation will trigger the brain to release serotonin, a naturally occurring anti-depressant neurotransmitter that boosts feelings of happiness and stimulates the mind and body to enjoy a more relaxed state."

Hopefully Moodagent will forward his findings as I'm sure it will be worth reading. As mentioned briefly on IMT last year, Moodagent lets listeners create playlists based on their mood, or create playlists to change their mood. The Moodagent engine, in part looks at one’s music library to understand the emotional characteristics of his or her music, and chooses the best music for the listener based on their emotions.

Three Videos Worth Watching

If you haven't seen these videos, you may want to find 20 minutes to watch them - you'll be glad you did.

CNN interview with Tim Westergren of Pandora:

Derek Sivers' Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy:


Nate Harrison's history of the the Amen Break:

Visualize the Artists you Listen to Most on Last.fm

Normalisr has made several enhancements over the last year-and-a-half, including a new site design, graphical widgets and thumbnail views of artist charts - nice work! If you haven't tried Normalisr before, it's a quick and fun app that ranks the artists you listen to on Last.fm, from the most number of tracks and time per artist, to the least.

For me, I'm not surprised by the artists Normalisr visualized for my profile, but I wouldn't rank those artists in that order. Meaning, I'd rank my favorite artists differently, but that's the beauty of apps like Normalisr, it's dynamic, like our music behavior, so it captures what we are listening to at moments in time, periods which are influenced by both internal and external variables (e.g. sociological, cultural, psychological, etc), reasons why music charts like Billboard are antiquated. Capturing and reflecting these types of influences relative to one's music listening activity has fascinated me for years, as it explores causation, an area that hopefully Band Metrics will eventually tap into.

Music and Society: Segmenting your Fan Community

Yesterday I gave this presentation at the C/O POP Music Festival and Conference in Cologne, Germany. Essentially, I explored the relationship between music and society, and how artists can better understand their own fan community through segmentation, which can lead to fan growth and increased revenue for them. Since I had several people ask for a copy so they could see the Facebook example and the resources again, here it is. Btw, Band Metrics will begin providing fan segmentation next week.

Social Influences on our Music Tastes

One of the reasons Band Metrics is being developed is to provide an application that will help display insight into some of the social interactions that influence success for bands, musicians and songs. To help further understand these social drivers, I've been going back to some of the sociologists and philosophers I've studied in the past. The one I've been focusing on lately is the German philosophical sociologist and musicologist, Theodor W. Adorno.

If I understand Adorno correctly, he seems to suggest that our individual music tastes within our social groups only contain minor differences, as the different artists we are listening to are producing similar music. Interesting position, and if that's correct, then what are the social drivers that cause one band to break out above all of the other bands we like? What impact do the influencers (i.e. tastemakers) of a group have on the band's rise? Do these tastemakers change overtime, within particular demographics and/or geographic locations?

It seems that part of Adorno's premise is that our musical tastes are not developed in a vacuum. Rather, they are developed out of contexts, and intricately and subtly constructed from within the social groups we are apart of (e.g. friends, family, colleagues, etc.). But, they are also seemingly deconstructed overtime, for example, as our social groups change, like when one transitions from high school to college.

Do you think Adorno's position is valid? What and/or who do you think are the influencers of the music you listen to? Do you tend to agree with them on their music recommendations?