music hack day london 2010 newspaper

WELCOME TO THE 8TH

4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010

LONDON

2 MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON. 4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010

MUSIC HACK DAY MARKS ITS EIGHTH EVENT WITH A RETURN TO LONDON

It’s September 2010 and Music Hack Day has returned to The Guardian’s lovely offices in London. It seems so long ago that I, along with a few co-conspirators, started hatching plans for the first ever event back in July last year. This is now our eighth event in just over 12 months, having taken in a diverse group of hackers at some wonder-ful venues in Berlin, Amsterdam, Boston, Stockholm and San Fran-cisco. It’s quite incredible to think how many people have joined us at Music Hack Days across the world, united by a love of music, hacking and making good things happen. In this paper we’ve collated a series of interviews with some of the all-star hackers that have attended sev-eral of the events so far. And we’ve been digging through the archive of Flickr photos to give everyone a taster of what went on in all the dif-ferent cities that have played host.

The idea of Music Hack Day is simple -- 24 hours to build the next generation of music apps. Web, mobile, software, hardware, in-struments, art -- anything goes as long as it’s music related. Whilst everyone else is busy talking about the future of music, at Music Hack Day we’re having a lot of fun actu-ally making it. And there’s been no shortage of awesome projects that have been demoed at the end of each and every event.

Whether it’s location-based music streaming services, robotic xylo-phones or t-shirts with song lyrics on them, we’ve certainly had an amazing selection of hacks built. We’ve seen the useful to the use-less, the serious to the hilari-ous, projects that have been launched commercially to those that are instantly forgotten. To help you remember some of the finest we’ve picked our top two or three from each Music Hack

Day so far and published them here in our own special app

gallery in print form.

It’s been amazing to see Music Hack Day grow

and develop. And I’ve met, and been

helped by, a lot of amazing people

along the way. But there is

a serious p o i n t

under-lying

a l l

this music hacking. In the old days it was DJs, A&R folks, labels and record store owners that were the gatekeepers to music. But today we’re seeing a new, important gatekeeper emerge... the hacker. Using new tools and open APIs developers can quickly create new apps that change how people explore, discover, create and in-teract with music.

Music Hack Day celebrates this, accelerates it and tries to push the envelope forward by bring-ing new digital music companies together with hackers from a number of different disciplines. And has hopefully helped grow a wonderful spirit of collabora-tion and creativity within this new ecosystem. It’s not surpris-ing that labels such as Univer-sal Music, Domino and PIAS all recognize the importance of engaging with this community and being at an event like Mu-sic Hack Day London.

But it’s not just about mu-sic discovery and con-sumption, Music Hack Day is increasingly about new forms and tools to ad-vance music cre-ation. And it’s been great to see so much h a c k i n g focused on this s ide o f

things too. Definitely an area we’re keen to see expand at future events. So keep your diaries free for the next Music Hack Day in Barcelona on 2/3rd October if you’re into the idea of some Au-tumn hacking in one of the best cities in Europe. And we hope we’ll be back again in Boston and Berlin some time in 2011.

Whispers of a NYC event still persist and I’m sure there’s even more to come. Keep following us on Twitter @musichackday and over at blog.musichackday.org for all the latest updates.

To leave you with a quote from fellow Music Hack Day organ-izer Paul Lamere, “someone once said - APIs are the sex organs of software. Data is the DNA. If this is true, then Mu-sic Hack Days are orgies.”

Love, Music & APIs Anton Lindqvist: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mptre/4319778424/

Words and pictures compiled by: Dave Haynes (@haynes_dave) SoundCloud & founder of Music Hack Day

MUSIC HACK DAY INTERVIEWS

Henrik BerggrenWhat made you decide to organ-ize a Music Hack Day in Stock-holm? After having such a blast in both London and Berlin we decided that Stockholm needed to host a hack too. We have some great companies here. Spotify was interested in joining from the be-ginning and that was of course interesting. Doberman, the com-pany that lent us the space, was very keen on making it happen as well. And not to forget, my co-organizer Mattias Arrelid & I love hacking!

What’s the recipe for success of a good music hack day? I would say the most important ingredients are the hackers themselves.

What’s your proper job when you’re not busy hacking? Hack-ing :) I’ve just started a new project around reading, you will all hear about it soon! It’s called Everyread and will take a crack at e-books and reading.

You’ve been to a few Music Hack Days now. What was your fa-vorite? London was magical since it was the first one but I think I liked Stockholm the best, it was so cool seeing everyone hacking in my hometown.

And your favorite Music Hack Day project so far? One of my personal favorites was Cristiano Betta’s ‘Music Zeitgeist’, so sim-ple and smart.

What are your top tips for anyone attending a Music Hack Day for the first time? Keep your project extremely simple, and when you’ve done that, cut off 90% of the features.

What would you love to see some-one build at an upcoming Music Hack Day? A playlist manager that can queue up tracks from any source, web, Spotify, iTunes etc. That would rock!

You’re behind your laptop, busy hacking, earphones plugged in. What are you listening to? 90’s skate punk.

What are your weapons of choice when starting out on a new hack? Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Heroku, Git, Textmate.

If you could spend 24 hours do-ing something completely differ-ent, what would it most likely be? Sailing.

Robb BöhnkeYou’ve been to a few Music Hack Days now. Which were those and what was your favorite? So far I’ve been to Berlin, Stockholm, Am-sterdam and San Francisco. My personal favourite being Stock-holm. Henrik & Mattias were great hosts, there were some awe-some hacks and a Batmobile (real-ly!) is obviously difficult to beat.

What made you want to come and take part in Music Hack Day in the first place? It was the chal-lenge of whether I could come up with something in the 24h time-frame that first made me want to come.

What have you personally got out of Music Hack Day? I’ve met many awesome people and always had a great time, it’s a very inspir-ing thing and I’m really glad to have been a part of that.

What’s your proper job when you’re not busy hacking? I’m studying Computer Science at Freie Universität Berlin and cur-rently interning at SoundCloud as part of their API team.

What’s your favorite Music Hack Day project so far? I’m always looking forward to what Matt Ogle from Last.fm comes up with, but if I have to pick just one, I’d say the ProximRadio + Blob-ble combo that Jonty Wareing and Michael Coffey did. Tracking the musical taste of everyone in a room using Bluetooth IDs is just very clever.

What are your top tips for anyone attending a Music Hack Day for the first time? Document well! Make sure to set up a good expla-nation of what you built and take some nice photos for the genera-tions of music hackers to come.

At the Berlin event you built an Arduino-powered xylophone ro-bot thingumy? What inspired you to do that (and do you have a bet-ter description)?! Haha, I’m afraid thingumy fits very well. When I met Ramsey at the event we decid-ed that we wanted to build some-thing related to music creation rather than consumption. I think we settled for the glockenspiel be-cause it’s comparatively easy to set up – and of course cheap.

How important is hardware hack-ing at an event like Music Hack Day? The majority of the projects are software, but I hope hard-ware’s presence grows over the next few Music Hack Day events. There are a lot of crazy ideas to be glued together.

You’re busy gluing and soldering, making another thingumy, ear-phones plugged in. What are you listening to? For these things, I prefer Medeski, Martin & Wood ‘End of the World Party’.

If you could spend 24 hours do-ing something completely differ-ent, what would it most likely be? Tough question, If you ever host a 24 hours LEGO marathon, count me in.

MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON. 4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010 3

THE MOST IMPORTANT INGREDIENTS ARE THE HACKERS THEMSELVES


Daniel RaffelWhat made you decide to step up and help organize a Music Hack Day in San Francisco? Music and technology are two longtime pas-sions of mine. I also enjoy help-ing to provide creative people with a platform and excuse to do their thing. That’s why I started the record labels Lucky Kitchen and Apartment B too.

What’s been the best thing about having organized a Music Hack Day event? Knowing that you helped encourage creative people to meet, collaborate and bring some-thing new into the world.

How is the scene out in San Fran-cisco for all things music, tech and hacking? The music tech scene in SF is very healthy. There is an enormous number of people with technical chops and creative ideas. When we put out word about this event we filled up our venue with a great group of folks in just a matter of hours.

And what’s the recipe for success of a good Music Hack Day? Persever-ance + collaboration + flexibility + creativity + humor + hard work + proper caffeination.

What’s your proper job when you’re not busy organizing hack days? I was Senior Product Manager at Yahoo! but recently left to become founder of an early stage, stealth startup. Learn more @HeavyBits.

Favorite Music Hack Day project so far? The Artikulator by Luke Iannini and Mike Rotondo.

What are your top tips for anyone attending a Music Hack Day for the first time? Try to stay relaxed, have fun, and no matter what the state of your project is at the end of the hackathon - demo it!

What do you think people get out of attending a Music Hack Day weekend? Satisfaction from being a maker. Pleasure from meeting peo-ple with common interests. Enjoy-ment from learning about new tools and services.

You’re behind your laptop, busy hacking earphones plugged in. What are you listening to? The al-bum ‘Quique’ by Seefeel

If you could spend 24 hours do-ing something completely differ-ent, what would it most likely be? Camping and hiking in Patagonia with my wife.

Thomas BonteYou’ve been to a few Music Hack Days now. Which was your favorite? The San Francisco edition was a blast, meeting up with the hackers of the infamous Silicon Valley com-panies. We combined MHD with SFMusicTech, SFNewtech and a visit at Twitter, Facebook and Stan-ford University. That was a week I shall not forget.

And what’s been your favorite Mu-sic Hack Day project so far? From the top of my mind: Sequencer_5, Jook, Charting and The Swinger.

What made you want to come and take part in Music Hack Day in the first place? Mainly curiosity. I had no clue what it was about. I have to admit I’m now completely hooked.

What have you personally got out of Music Hack Day? Being able to directly speak with the guys who are running the hottest and latest music startups is enormously help-ful whilst trying to setup my own business. And of course the aspect of learning so many new things in just 24 hours. There is just no other equal event on this planet.

What’s your proper job when you’re not busy hacking? My main activ-ity now is putting MuseScore.com on the rails. I do this together with Nicolas Froment & Werner Schweer and we hope this will become the SoundCloud of sheet music ;-)

What are your top tips for anyone attending a Music Hack Day for the first time? Check out the API docu-mentation in advance and prepare some ideas. Make sure you follow the #musichackday tag on twit-ter and fire away your own ideas. Finding people to team up with in advance will gain you a few hours during the event.

What would you love to see some-one build at an upcoming Mu-sic Hack Day? I would love to see digital instruments such as dig-ital pianos be able to connect with API’s. What if you could send your recording straight to SoundCloud? Or more related to my business, retrieve sheet music (MusicXML) from the MuseScore.com API and let the piano teach you how to play it. I would love to brainstorm about that with the Yamaha people.

What is the best thing about Mu-sic Hack Day and what more would you like to see? As said by Stewart Brand, “The true nature of any new technology can be learned best from what enthusiasts do with it.” I believe this is completely applica-ble to Music Hack Day. One thing I would like to see more, is more Bel-gians coming to the MHD events. I’m looking for the critical mass to bring Music Hack Day to Brussels one day.

You’re busy hacking away, ear-phones plugged in. What are you listening to? Film music. I was a big fan of Streamingsoundtracks.com but Spotify replaced it completely.

Matt OgleWhat’s your proper job, when you’re not busy hacking? I’ve spent the last five years at Last.fm, where I’m currently Head of Web Product. As such, I look after many aspects of the website, API, and overall Last.fm feature set.

But you presented The Echo Nest API at one of the events. Would you say there is a spirit of collaboration at Music Hack Day? There certain-ly is! The online music space is still a cozy size, and Music Hack Day in particular has helped the com-munity get to know each other bet-ter. There’s friendly competition of course, but I think the fact that eve-ryone is there because they love the same thing -- music -- makes a big difference. You can see this in the number of hackers who meet at the events and end up spontaneously building something together.

How many Music Hack Days have you been to now, it’s quite a few right? I’ve only missed the Berlin one, so this latest London day will make it... seven? Oh dear.

And which was your favorite event? They’ve all been top-notch but if I had to pick one I’d probably say Stockholm. I’ve never seen so many hackers stay at the venue overnight and the quality of the demos was impressive. Also, the beer fridge was made of snow (warming my Canadian heart) and the Batmobile turned up. I mean, really.

And your favorite Music Hack Day project so far? I know it’s made a lot of lists already, but I have to go with “The Swinger” by Tristan from The Echo Nest. It’s that rare hack: small, spontaneous, and de-livers exactly what it promises -- in-credibly listenable swing renditions of any tune you feed it. Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around what an API can do but The Swing-er brings one to life.

I HAVE TO ADMIT I’M NOW COMPLETELY HOOKED

What are your top tips for anyone attending a Music Hack Day for the first time? Don’t skip the work-shops — a lot of them conclude with tasty hints on brand new (or even unreleased) API’s that can be interesting to hang a hack on. Also, don’t be afraid to meet people and solicit collaborators. You don’t have to go it alone!

What would you love to see some-one build at an upcoming Music Hack Day? I’m excited by the trend of more hardware and music crea-tion hacks. More of that would be great. I’m also interested in hacks that help me learn more about the music I already love, which is an often-neglected component of mu-sic discovery.

What are your criteria when decid-ing what to hack on at the next Mu-sic Hack Day? Don’t overthink it! Just start working on your first im-pulse and let the 24-hour time limit inspire you to be ruthless. Carve it down to the bare essentials and get your idea out.

You’re behind your laptop, busy hacking, earphones plugged in. What are you listening to? Hehe, I made a whole website to answer that question! (http://www.last.fm/user/flaneur) Lately, though, it’s been 70s soft rock (no idea), Cana-dian folk, and some chillwave.

If you could spend 24 hours do-ing something completely different, what would it most likely be? Watch-ing a space shuttle launch — there are only a couple left, ever. Next one’s in November, care to join?

Sabrina LeandroWhat’s your proper job when you’re not busy hacking? I’m a back-end developer at Songkick. Lately I’ve been working on improving our API for partners and other developers.

You’ve taken part in several Music Hack Days on behalf of Songkick now. Which has been your favorite? All of them have been lots of fun. But if I had to pick... I’d say the Stockholm one, for exposing me (a Brazilian!) to extreme weather, and still making the event feel welcom-ing and cosy. And for having a Bat-mobile.

What do you think Songkick has got out of participating in an event like Music Hack Day? We get lots of feedback about our API during Music Hack Day. It’s really inter-esting to see others using it, to un-derstand where it hurts, where it works. We have hacked on our API during the events, from requests made by other developers, building new features on the weekend that later get included for everyone.

What has been your favorite Music Hack Day project so far? There are so many... I really like 6 Degrees of Black Sabbath. Not only does it show how much interesting data is available out there, but it’s also su-per fun.

What would you love to see some-one build at an upcoming Music Hack Day? On Songkick, users can say which events they attended. We call it their “gigography”. I’m such a big data nerd and I fill in mine reli-giously. So I’d love to see a cool visu-alization of that data, the venues I’ve been to the most, the artists and gen-res I like, how my taste for live music has changed through the years...

What are your top tips for a compa-ny attending or putting on a work-shop at a Music Hack Day for the first time? Come prepared and open to discuss your product and API with developers. It’s such an nice opportunity to get direct feedback.

What ingredients do you think make up a successful Music Hack Day? Interested hackers, coffee and powerful wi-fi.

You’re behind your laptop, busy hacking, earphones plugged in. What are you listening to? The same kind of music I listen any-time: sweet and catchy indiepop.

What are your weapons of choice when starting out on a new hack? To get something finished in 24 hours, I try to use tools I’m already familiar with and dynamic lan-guages like Ruby or Python.

If you could spend 24 hours do-ing something completely differ-ent, what would it most likely be? I don’t think I’d be able to focus on one thing for 24 hours by myself!

Paul LamereWhat’s your proper job when you’re not busy hacking? I work at a com-pany called the Echo Nest which is a music intelligence company located near Boston MA. I spend my day thinking about what we can do to make it easier for developers to create the next generation music apps. A lucky thing for me is I get to hack as part of my day job.

You’ve played an essential role in spreading Music Hack Day to so many different cities? What do you think is the key to its success? The key to Music Hack Day success comes from its ability to attract individuals who are extremely pas-sionate about music and technol-ogy. When put into the same space for a weekend, really exciting things tend to happen.

And what’s been the best thing about having organized a Music Hack Day event? It is great to meet so many creative people who are re-ally excited to spend their weekend hacking. I remember at the end of the Music Hack Day Boston event, two student developers won Rock Band prizes for their hacks - they were so revved up about the experi-ence. It was great to be a part of that.

Boston was one of the largest Mu-sic Hack Days so far. What do you think made that event so popular? Music Hack Day Boston was the first Music Hack Day held in the North America. After seeing all of the fun people were having at the Music Hack Days in London, Berlin and Amsterdam, when we finally had one on this side of the world, there were a lot of people ready to go.

You’ve been to a few Music Hack Days now, what was your favorite? I have a feeling that my favorite Mu-sic Hack Day will be the one held next month in London. At previous Music Hack Days where I was an organizer, I spent too much time worrying about event details (would the food arrive on time, would the wireless work) to really enjoy the event. But in London, I’ll just be able to participate without all of the worry. I’m really looking forward to it.

And your favorite music hack day project so far? My (probably biased) favorite project so far has been Tris-tan’s Swinger. Tristan wrote a lit-tle bit of code that will make any song swing. It’s a lot of fun. My favorite non-Echo Nest project is Matt Ogle’s ‘Bragging Rights’. It uses the Last.fm API to let you set-tle the argument, “Who listened to that band first?”. The really neat thing about it is that Matt wrote it in about 3 hours.

What are your top tips for anyone attending a Music Hack Day for the first time? Reach out to others at the Music Hack Day. Look for someone who may share the same ideas that you have but has dif-ferent skills. Work as a team with someone you don’t know. And most importantly, finish something.

What digital music companies should we be keeping an eye on? The ones to keep an eye on are the individual hackers who are not be-holden to any VCs or a Board of Directors. Today’s hacker will be tomorrow’s successful digital music company.

You’re behind your laptop, busy hacking, earphones plugged in. What are you listening to? Oh, that varies - but I’m most productive when listening to very high tempo, energetic electronic music - lately I’ve been listening to Venetian Snares when coding.

What are your weapons of choice when starting out on a new hack? Some tools in my toolbox: My MacBook pro, Python or Java, Mu-sic APIs (Echo Nest, Musicbrainz, Last.fm, etc.), graph libraries (net-workx, prefuse), 3D libraries (jme)

If you could spend 24 hours doing something completely different, what would it most likely be? I’m a frustrated musician, I’d probably spend time playing with music gen-eration software like CSound or chuck to try to make some music.


LET THE 24-HOUR TIME LIMIT INSPIRE YOU TO BE RUTHLESS


Opposite page

Top left:Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss settling in for an overnight SoundCloud hack session. Henrik Berggren: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hinkeb/3717748640/

Bottom left: Yes the Batmobile really did show up at Music Hack Day Stockholm. Gernot Poetsch: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gernot/4316877542/

Top right: Hardware workshop at Music Hack Day Boston. Holly Hasbritt: http://www.flickr.com/photos/habber/4129977458/

Centre right: Music Hack Days love stickers. Henrik Berggren: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hinkeb/3717752990/

Bottom right: This was no ordinary guitar. Holly Habstritt: http://www.flickr.com/photos/habber/4582493578/

This page

Top left: Headphones on, busy hacking. David Kjelkerud: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidkjelkerud/4321322483/

Top right: Workshops galore at the first Music Hack Day in London. Matt Ogle: http://www.flickr.com/photos/flaneurdeluxe/3716952352/

Bottom left: The staple diet of a music hacker. Pizza... and lots of it. Michael Schieben: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mschieben/4548221731/

Centre right: Music Hack Day Stockholm. Paula Martilla: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulamarttila/4316536472/

Bottom right: Spotify releasing libspotify for Mac & Windows. Rasmus Andersson: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rsms/4555695317/


Music Zeitgeist By: Cristiano Betta (@cbetta)

Info: http://bit.ly/musiczeitgeist Site: http://zeitgeist.cristianobetta.com/ Tools: Everyhit.com (built API), LyricsWiki API, Wordle.net

Cristiano was wondering if it was possible to visualize the cultural shifts from decade to decade in another way than through the top charts. So what better than a Wor-dle word-cloud visualization of the music lyrics for the last 6 decades. Out of necessity he actually built his own API on top of EveryHit.com and ran this against the Lyr-icsWiki API. The result is a really interesting insight into the moods of each decade. Turns out there was a lot of ‘love’, ‘yeah’ and ‘hold’-ing in the 60’s. Sounds fantastic!

Lonely Harps By: Jamie Hollingworth (@jhollingworth) and David Padbury (@davidpadbury)

Info: http://bit.ly/lonelyharps Tools: Last.fm to find and match the hotties, Gigulate to get those tickets for the perfect first date, 7Digital to buy tracks for your soundtracks.

Ask yourself, what’s important in a serious relationship? Commit-ment? Mutual Respect? Finding your partner vaguely attractive when not drunk? Jamie and David actually had no idea but admitted to both being comically unsuccess-ful with women. But they figured that although the above are likely a factor, being able to relate to each other around common tastes in music is definitely much more important. Probably. So you’ve guessed it, this is a dating applica-tion based around music which helps you find, setup the ideal first date and create soundtracks for those long awkward silences when you’ve run out of things to say. The site had a sibling-related bug, which added to the pure genius and comedy of Lonely Harps.

Citysounds.fm By: David Kjelkerud (@davidkjelkerud), Henrik Berggren (@henrikberggren)

Info: http://bit.ly/citysoundsfm Site: http://citysounds.fm Tools: SoundCloud API, Flickr API, Ruby on Rails, jQuery

It could be said that cities have distinct sounds, from the techno of Berlin to the tropical rhythms of Tunapuna in Trinidad. Citys-ounds.fm embraces that concept by letting you listen to the sound of your favorite city -- taking the latest music from SoundCloud, identify-ing its location and then displaying the most popular cities and their tracks. The site also finds corre-sponding images from each city via tags on Flickr. The site is one of the slickest we’ve seen so far at Music Hack Day and the team even went on to build an iPhone app at the fol-lowing Music Hack Day in Berlin.

TracksOnAMap By: Johan Uhle (@freenerd)

Info: http://bit.ly/tracksonamap Site: http://tracksonamap.com Source: http://github.com/freenerd/SoundCloud-Map/ Tools: SoundCloud, Google Maps, Google App Engine

The ingeniously named TracksOn-AMap does exactly what it says on the tin. It takes the latest tracks from SoundCloud, works out their location and then displays them on Google Maps in a rather slick looking way. Tracks can then be tweeted or shared to Facebook and there’s a navigation bar at the bottom which allows you to filter by genre. So if you want to check out where the hottest dubstep scenes are in the world then this is the perfect way to see (and hear) them. The project was forked a year later to create Twestival-fm.com, a charity project that asked musicians around the world to donate tracks and raise money for Concern Worldwide.

Xylobot By: Ramsey Arnaoot, Robert Böhnke (@ceterum_censeo)

Info: http://bit.ly/xylobot Site: http://vimeo.com/6668819 Source: http://beer2peer.com/hack-day/xylobot_software.zip Tools: 1 Arduino microcontroller, 6 Servos, 1 Xylophone, Hot glue, Wood

Physical hacks have played an im-portant role at Music Hack Day and this has been one of the fin-est. The Xylobot is an Arduino-controlled xylophone, capable of handling midi-input. The guys hooked 6 servo-motors up to an Arduino running custom firmware and a java application handling the incoming midi data, sending se-rial commands to the board. Some sympathy has to go to whoever sat next to the team for 24 hours while the guys finetuned it :)

THE BEST HACKS FROM MUSIC HACK DAY AROUND THE WORLD

HACKS FROM BERLIN 2009

HACKS FROM LONDON 2009

Bowie S-S-S-Similarities By: Mike Mandel Info: http://bit.ly/bowiesimilarities Site: http://mr-pc.org/bowie/ Tools: Python, Numpy/Scipy, Musically Intelligent Machines autotagging API

Ever wanted to know what the most Bowie-esque sounding moments of Bowie’s music career were. Or the least? Mike used the Musically Intelligent Machines autotagging api to analyze and tag all of David Bowie’s music. Then lined it up in order and calculated the similar-ity between every 10-second clip and every other 10-second clip in terms of the automatically gener-ated descriptions. Next step was to make some pretty pictures of the resulting similarity matrix. You can then listen to the clips in ques-tion by clicking on the matrix and you can zoom in and out and re-center the view. Perhaps not the most practical hack ever made, but it certainly impressed.

HacKey By: Matt Ogle (@flaneur)

Info: http://bit.ly/hackey Site: http://users.last.fm/~matt/hackey/ Tools: Last.fm API, The Echo Nest Search API.

What’s in a key? Are you a major or a minor person? Are there keys that define your music taste or are there no patterns at all? All-star Last.fm hacker Matt Ogle was mildy curi-ous about these questions and de-cided to answer them once and for all. So on a cold winter’s weekend in Stockholm he built HacKey, a web app that uses your Last.fm user-name to retrieve your top tracks and run them against The Echo Nest’s search API to analyse their musical key and show you your own distri-bution. As Matt states, his project also nicely fits the criteria for his many Music Hack Day projects.... namely being utterly useless and in-volving colourful pie charts.

Proxim Radio By: Jonty Wareing (@jonty), Michael Coffey (@eartle) Info: http://bit.ly/proximradio Source: http://github.com/Jonty/Proxim.fm Tools: Python, Last.fm client, Lightb-lue, bluetooth

You walk into a bar, there’s music blasting over the speakers, but it’s not exactly to everybody’s tastes. If only there was a way the jukebox could work out everybody’s music tastes and play back the music that everybody likes. Well, in theory, now there is. Proxim Radio is an app that scans for bluetooth devices that have Last.fm usernames as the device name, then makes the Last.fm client play back music at the in-tersection of all their libraries. Now if only this actually happened in real life!

Songkick On Tour By: Matt Biddulph (@mattb)

Info: http://bit.ly/songkicktour Site: http://www.vimeo.com/9103599 Tools: Songkick, Dopplr, JRuby, Sinatra, Google AppEngine

You’re planning several trips, visit-ing new cities and want to check out some gigs while you’re there. But how are you going to know what’s on that you’ll like? And where to buy tickets? Songkick On Tour connects to your Dopplr account, retrieves your travel itinerary and then checks Songkick for the cities you’ll be in. Nice and simple, but you’ll never miss a great gig while you’re travelling again!

Songshirts By: Matt Ogle (@flaneur), Floris Dekker (@floriz), Tim Bormans (@por)

Info: http://bit.ly/song-shirts Site: http://users.last.fm/~matt/song-shirts Tools: Last.fm API, Zazzle

Band t-shirts are pretty popular right? But what about some new clobber based on the lyrics to your favourite songs? Songshirts takes your Last.fm username and then builds your own personal t-shirt store. The results can actually be quite amusing. Much laughter could be heard from the old sofa in Amsterdam on which Matt, Floris and Tim cooked this little project up. But there’s always at least one t-shirt you could be tempted to buy. And should that be the case you can simply click through to Zazzle and make an order.

HACKS FROM BOSTON 2009

HACKS FROM STOCKHOLM 2010

HACKS FROM AMSTERDAM 2010



Sound-Score Cloud By: Thomas Bonte (@thomasbonte)

Info: http://bit.ly/soundscorecloud Site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eodrg9OIgg0 Tools: Musescore, SoundCloud API

This clever hack allows you to play a SoundCloud widget in sync with MuseScore sheet music. This means it’s possible for artists to sync their audio recordings stored on Sound-Cloud.com with their sheet music stored on MuseScore.com. Obvi-ously, the audio recording can be a performance but why not a tutorial of the artist explaining how to play the song step by step. Or think of a background track so you can play along with your instrument, follow-ing the sheet music as a guide. Oh, and with that being said, no more page turning since that will be done for you!

Six Degrees Of Black Sabbath By: Paul Lamere (@plamere)

Info: http://bit.ly/sixdegreesofblacksabbath Site: http://labs.echonest.com/SixDegrees Tools: MusicBrainz, The Echo Nest, Play.me APIs

Ever played the game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’? Well this is the music geek equivalent. Six Degrees of Black Sabbath finds connections between artists. Any kind of connec-tions are considered - collaborations, aliases, personal relationships and so on. And just like Google maps, if you don’t like a route (let’s say it goes through Yoko Ono) you can easily re-route around her. This hack uses data from MusicBrainz, as well as the Echo Nest and the Play.me APIs. Oh, and it’s rather fun.

iSticks (with iSteelPan and iTaiko) By: David Ayman Shamma

Info: http://bit.ly/isticks Site: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/isteelpan/id373584341?mt=8 Source: http://www.instructables.com/id/iStick-How-to-make-a-drumstick-for-an-iPad/ Tools: Conductive fabric, iPhone SDK, sticks

Multi-touch is a wonderful thing. But sometimes, the act of making music is done with a tool, like a drumstick or a stylus. It turns out, it’s easy to make a set of drumsticks for a modern capacitive device (like an iPad). At Music Hack Day San Francisco, Ayman Shamma not only made a steel pan drum and a taiko app for his iPad, but he also made some conductive fabric mal-lets with which to drum. Awesome.

The Swinger By: Tristan Jehan

Info: http://bit.ly/the-swinger Site: http://soundcloud.com/teejay/every-breath-you-take-swing-version Source: http://code.google.com/p/echo-nest-remix/source/browse/trunk/examples/swinger/swinger.py Tools: The Echo Nest Python Remix SDK including, pydirac, action.py, cloud.py. SoundCloud for audio hosting.

The swinger puts the swing back into your music. Tristan Jehan created a command line python script (about one line of code per hacking hour) which takes two arguments (i.e. a song and a swing factor) and alters (i.e. time-stretches) every beat, one at a time, to give it a swing feel. It works by stretching and compressing every half beat to complementary dura-tions, pulling and pushing the audio, while retaining the original tempo. The effect is controlled by the swing factor parameter (a value between -1 and 1) representing the percent of deviation from original (0 being no variation). With negative values, swingy songs can also be turned to square binary rhythms. So you could say, it swings both ways.

Artikulator By: Luke Ianinni, Mike Rotondo

Info: http://bit.ly/artikulator Site: http://mashable.com/2010/05/18/music-ipad/ Tools: SuperCollider, iPhone SDK

Luke Ianinni and Mike Rotondo hadn’t met before Music Hack Day. But whilst comparing notes at the San Francisco event they realized that they’d both sketched out the same idea. Artikulator is a univer-sally approachable, multiplayer finger-painting synthesizer and composition tool inspired by the graphical compositions of György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Edgar Varèse. Draw some lines and listen as your iPad/iPhone/iTouch plays back your musical creation. Wonderful.

HACKS FROM AMSTERDAM 2010

HACKS FROM SAN FRANCISCO 2010

SoundSoftware.ac.uk are announcing their UK Autumn School, Software Car-pentry for Audio and Music Researchers, which will take place in London on 1-5 November 2010. The school is to train UK-based PhD students and research-ers in the software development skills re-quired to build reliable research software quickly and with a minimum of effort, and so maximize the impact of their research.

Software development is a fundamental part of much audio and music research, yet PhD students and young researchers are typically not taught how to build the software they need for their research in

an efficient, systematic way. Instead, they have to learn for themselves how to build, validate, maintain, and share complex pro-grams, which can lead to big problems later, when others try to build on their research.

For more information about the Autumn School and the nomination process visit: www.soundsoftware.ac.uk/autumnschool-2010-cfn


O2 Litmus have been hugely supportive in making this year’s Music Hack Day London take place. For those who might not already know O2 Litmus is O2’s community project dedicated to finding and nurturing the very best new mobile, wireless and internet-enabled applications and services. What this means for you as developers is access to a plethora of tools to create modern, cutting-edge applica-tions: network APIs, handset toolkits and re-sources and even free advice on marketing and legal issues.

Interestingly, Litmus can help developers make money from their applications via a unique revenue model –that gives them ac-cess to millions of customers right across Tel-efonica O2’s international networks. For O2 customers, Litmus gives them the chance to get their hands on the best new mobile appli-cations first, long before their friends or family have access to them. At Litmus, they have real influence in the community, helping to decide which applications and ideas sink and which of them swim, thanks to community tools that let customers talk directly to developers, re-view and rate their applications and suggest new features.

Find out more at www.o2litmus.co.uk

O2 LITMUS OPENS UP TOOLS AND NETWORK APIS FOR DEVELOPERS

UK AUTUMN SCHOOL: SOFTWARE CARPENTRY FOR AUDIO AND MUSIC RESEARCHERS

The Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) is a world-leading multidisciplinary research group in the field of Music & Audio Technology. Since its founding members joined Queen Mary Univer-sity in 2001, the Centre has grown to become arguably the UK’s leading Dig-ital Music research group, with work covering the Music Ontology and using the Semantic Web for Music. Its algo-rithms and data sets are regularly re-leased under Open Source and Creative Commons licences.

With its broad range of skills and a strong fo-cus on making innovation usable, C4DM is

ideally placed to work with industry leaders in forging new business models for the mu-sic industry. With many students, including Rebecca Stewart, attending the very first Music Hack Day in London its very fitting that C4DM is now lending its support to this latest event.

Find out more at www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic and www.isophonics.net for the latest research.

C4DM LEND SUPPORT TO MUSIC HACK DAY

Earlier this year, Telefónica Developer Communities in partnership with VisionMobile launched ‘Developer Economics 2010’, a global research project delving into all aspects of mobile application development. The full report, available at www.d e v e l o p e r e c o n o m i c s . c o m , surveyed 400+ international developers, across all major mobile platforms and features 35 data points spanning the entire application development process. The report represented one of the largest mobile developer surveys to date. Participants came from 53 countries and 290 companies. More than 40% of respondents have at least 5 years experience in developing apps, while 78% have

been developing apps for more than 12 months.

James Parton, Head of Developer Marketing at Telefonica, explains why the research was commissioned: “For a long time we have felt the industry has been lacking research that credibly tackled the key issues facing developers. ‘Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond’ was an ambitious project. I am confident that due to the quality of the participants, this research has uncovered many of the key issues in application development today.”

The research provides insights into all the steps of mobile app

development, from application planning, code development and debugging, to support, go-to-market channels, promotion, revenue generation, as well as covering hot topics such as the role of open source and network operators. What was clear from the survey was the growing power of Android in mobile software and content, which may in part be due to the fact that mastering Symbian takes 15 months, compared with less than six months for Android.

Parton has encouraged developers to give their own feedback on the report: “This report breaks new ground, and as such I feel it opens as many questions as it answers. I

would encourage you to feedback your opinions on the findings at www.developereconomics.com. If you are a mobile developer

and would like to be involved in next year’s report, please contact VisionMobile at [email protected].”

DEVELOPER ECONOMICS 2010: ‘THE DEVELOPER’S DILEMMA’

Music Hack Day is run entirely by volunteers and simply wouldn’t happen without the amazing con-tributions of so many people. We’re bound to miss a few names but here’s some we’d like to thank:

Martyn Davies, Jonty Wareing, Phil Cowans, Sabrina Leandro, James Darling, John Martin, Nicky Thompson for steering Music Hack Day London in the right direction.

Rebecca Stewart, Mark Sandler, Mark Plumbley @ Queen Mary University of London.

Neil Cocker @ Dizzyjam for the t-shirts. Kamiel, Edial and Your-Neighbours.de for the video.

Elayne Checketts, Paul Gold-ing, James Parton, Ben Mat-thews @ O2 Litmus for being such great supporters of Music Hack Day in London and all

our other wonderful sponsors.

Alex Hazell and the amazing team at The Guardian who really know how to put on a Music Hack Day.

Paul Lamere, David Noel, Henrik Berggren, Mattias Arrelid, Dan-iel Raffel, Vincent Lindeboom, Tim Heineke, Jon Pierce, Elissa Barrett for having the courage to make Music Hack Day happen in so many wonderful places.

Everyone from all the companies that have participated (too many to name!), everyone who’s writ-ten, blogged or tweeted about what we’re doing and most im-portantly... everyone who’s shown up at a Music Hack Day and finished a hack (or just hung around to enjoy the free pizza!).

Special thanks to Alex Parrott for designing this paper. More info at www.alexparrott.co.uk

Info

Email: [email protected] Web: musichackday.org Blog: blog.musichackday.org Wiki: wiki.musichackday.org Twitter: @musichackday

Please add the #musichackday hashtag to any photos, tweets, video

THANKS FROM MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON

music hack day london 2010 newspaper

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