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:

musiXmatch: next generation song lyrics API

musiXmatch (mXm) is a new startup that's aiming to build the next generation song lyrics API, providing detailed metadata about the artists who performed it, the genre, influences, related artists, and digital rights management for clearing content for distribution. The company has partnered with MusicBrainz to help acquire metadata, and recently raised 400K EUR (about 500K USD). While musiXmatch is presently a restricted alpha product, additional features will include:

• search lyrics using either unstructured queries or open source identifiers such as MusicBrainz;
• take advantage of metered search-engine friendly lyric displays without the worry of copyright infringement;
• obtain a complete list of performing artists, organized and filtered in a variety of ways, including biographies and images;
• obtain a complete discography for each performing artist, complete with release dates, tracks and cover art

The Echo Nest adds Music Library to Developer Platform with Play.me Partnership

Over the last year, Music Hack Day and other music developer events have been a sandbox for hundreds of new music apps built on The Echo Nest’s platform, from music video games to remix apps, playlisting tools to mobile apps and more; here are a few. But, most have never been commercialized, as content licensing constraints have been a roadblock, until now...

Beginning today, and just in time for Music Hack Day San Francisco, developers will have access to millions of songs powered by Play.me. The partnership gives developers both open access to The Echo Nest developer platform along with Play.me’s deep library of licensed music content, allowing anyone to potentially commercialize their hacks through affiliate revenue. Additionally, developers can earn money from cash incentives for the most popular applications.

RadioDNS

The RadioDNS project is creating an extensible DNS based specification which could significantly improve the delivery and experience of broadcast radio over the Internet by linking the stations signal to IP delivered services, allowing for interactive enhancements like music ratings, artist news, visualizations, meta data, and more.

Band Metrics Releases Public Beta

Its been a long time coming, but I'm happy to announce that we finally released the public beta of Band Metrics this morning from Midem.

What took so long? Great question. We had to re-engineer the entire system, as the previous two versions were flawed. This was a difficult decision that consumed our time, but it's better to get the architecture right before releasing it to the public. We now feel confident we've built a system, which is entirely Ruby/Rails that will not only collect, store and analyze artist data accurately, but will be fast and scale rapidly, as we also moved our entire system into the cloud via Engine Yard. As an example, Band Metrics now pulls-in and displays initial artist data within seconds, not days or hours. Needless to say, I'm proud of our developers.

We also streamlined the site, and added a couple of new features, including Fan Segmentation and Influence Measurement. Essentially, this allows artists, managers, labels and the like to see a breakdown of fans (based initially on Twitter comments), and a fan's influence among their friends (below is a brief screencast).

We still have lots of work to do, including design enhancements and new features, as well as incorporate our existing analytical tools into the new site (we ran out of time as we wanted to release at Midem), so we greatly appreciate your ongoing support, as this is just the beginning!

Projects from Music Hackday Boston 2009

Part hackathon, part music tech gathering, Music Hackdayis an event where participants conceptualize, create and present/demo their music applications all in one weekend. As Music Hackday Boston concludes this afternoon, I've listed their creative projects below - almost 40, which is extraordinary considering they had less than 48 hours, so congrats to everyone - you guys did some great work!

• Paul's Music Wreckommender: an anti-recommender. Give it an artist that you like and it will return a list of artists that are as far away as possible form the original (project page).
• Remix Shell: a simple command shell for Echo Nest Remix one-liners (project page)
• Fugueomatic: Fugues are pieces of music that follow a certain set of rules and a number of voices come in, like a "round", and end up in somewhat different places than where they start out, all the while following a fairly strict and established form (project page)
• EchnoNestLive: EchoNestLive let's producers sample songs in ways they never have before. Using EchoNest's APIs to analyze songs and using Java, Max/MSP, Ableton Live and MaxForLive to play back pieces of a song based on specified pitches, loudness levels, timbres, and other parameters (project page).
• MySpace Hacked V1.0: a user friendly MySpace design/template, that supports the new 360 environment (project page).
• Bricolage v10e-6: The EchoNest Remix API includes functionality to break down a song into short units of sound [segments], and also to measure features on these segments [pitch classes, timbre, and volume are currently provided].  Previous work by Ben Lacker [afromb.py in the echonest remix examples directory] resynthesized a track by mixing in closely matching segments from a different track (project page)
• LastFMD2FWTFBBQ: hacked LastFM and the Topspin applications to show offers from an artist inside the LastFM buy button drop-down menus (project page)
• Playdar SoundCloud resolver: resolves SoundCloud search results for Playdar (project page)
• SoundCloud Paulcast: enables podcasts for SoundCloud resources, both private and public.(project page).
• Noteflight Audio-to-Notation Import: a hack of the Noteflight web-based notation editor to import free-range MP3s on the web into a rough "skeleton" of a musical score, using the EchoNest Remix API to supply a metrical and key signature analysis and some rough notions of pitch and harmony.  The resulting score, when played, follows the score in metrical synchronization with the original audio track (project page).
• Melody Search with Noteflight API hack: a hack to use NoteFlight's embeddable Score Objects to let users pick out specific pieces of a melody to search a large database of scores for similar songs (project page).
• HTML5 <audio annotation: a jQuery plugin that uses the HTML5 media elements API to show elements at certain timestamps during the playback of audio or video media (project page).
• Location-aware Blog-aware Contextual Concerts Listing: create an upcoming concerts listing, specific to the users location, but based off the posting history of a music blog. In essence, highly relevant upcoming concerts (project page).
• Ambient Text Mashup of "HashMap" & "Frequency" for Modest Mouse: The Good Times Are Killing Me: ambient Text Mashup of "HashMap" & "Frequency" for Modest Mouse: The Good Times Are Killing Me (project page).
• MixApp Live Acts Mashup: given an existing social music listening application, add a pane which displays upcoming shows for the artist currently playing, and a link to buy tickets.  Integrate the buy function into the live chat. (project page)
• Sonar: a front-end to control your Sonos multi-room music system that allows you to scan your friends Twitter, Last.FM or other (to be implemented) feeds for music recommendations. We then use Playdar to resolve those songs to playable tracks, and enqueue that music for playing anywhere in your house on your Sonos system. (project page)
• Sonos-Twitter Rewriting: artist, album, and track metadata are conveniently supplied to the Sonos-Twitter service, but they are currently being ignored by the official service.  This hack takes advantage of the metadata and adds rewrite rules which can be shortened in many convenient ways (project page).
• Audio to Midi to Score: using the EchoNest API for audio analysis in conjunction with spectral imaging tools, it's a prototyped audio-to-midi conversion.  The resulting midi file can be played or imported into NoteFlight (project page).
• Amazon EC2 image for music mashup sites: an amazon EC2 image for easy bootstrapping of music- and audio-heavy websites (project page)
• iTunesAirBridge and Playdar AS3 Lib: This project demonstrates using the NativeProcess API to access iTunes via Windows COM.  The demo only contains two commands for retrieving the user's library and playlist.  However, because the iTunes interaction happens via VBScript on Windows (and soon AppleScript on OSX) so anyone can easily extend the library to do more (ie creating playlists, writing a download manager for a music store that imports to itunes) and not have to deal with compiling and scripting C (project page)
• Music-Synchronized Composing Interface Using Echonest API: musicpainter is a collaborative graphical composing environment created by Wu-Hsi where novice users can easily create and share music (project page).
• Outlier FM: Outlier FM is a weekend's attempt to utilize advanced technology to search for beauty and surprise in even the most overproduced of popular music (project page). 
• PartyLister: the PartyLister is a playlist generator built to try out new collaborative playlist generation ideas (project page).
• playdarTunes: playdarTunes allows you to play your iTunes music inside the browser using Playdar. It will open and parse an iTunes Music Library XML file. The music can then be played from a local disk or anywhere Playdar resolves it to (project page) 
• Large-scale similarity using EchoNest: looking at usual patterns in a subspace of the EchoNest dataset made out of 43K songs (project page).
• Cowbot: used the Echo Nest Remix API to extract beat timings, then fed these timings to a servo that plays the cowbell in time with any song (project page).
• Bandsintown City Mixtape: mixtape of artists playing shows in a given city, links to buy tickets through Bandsintown. (project page). 
• Bowie S-S-S-Similarities: I used the Musically Intelligent Machines autotagging api to analyze and tag all of David Bowie's music.  Then I lined it up in order and calculated the similarity between every 10-second clip and every other 10-second clip in terms of the automatically generated descriptions.(project page). 
• Lyric Similator: Lyric Similator lets you explore songs based on the similarity of their lyrics (project page). 
• NPR Tourfilter Mashup: adding NPR stories about music artists to tourfilter's drop-down metadata section for concert listings (project page). 
• Quasiphone: The Quasiphone is a new instrument which uses musical notation in the browser as the controller (project page). 
• DJ Hot Scene: DJ Hot Scene is a hack that pulls MetaData from Native Intruments Tracktor Scratch Pro DJ Tool. The current artist and song is extracted through a faux icecast server (project page).
• Hammond Organ Hacking: Hammond organ "chopping" is an industry unto itself (making large and heavy organs into manageable and modular pieces (project page).
• JamTones on Android: (project page).
• SoundCloud Phanai iPhone App: (project page).
• Living Playlist: The Living Playlist is a real-time, collaborative playlisting web app to encourage social listening through the web (project page).
• Napster Playdar Resolver: Napsdar uses the Napster API to provide access to Napster's streaming collection via Playdar (project page).

This looks like such a good time that I'm gonna try and bring it to Atlanta and Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology.