Found Around: Music Hack Day in Review
Written by Aidan Rush Posted in: Found Around on October 19, 2010
Whether you’re deeply rooted or just remotely interested in the music tech/development/programming industries here in Boston, this past weekend was awesome. That’s because Music Hack Day returned to our city and the results were pretty stunning. From socially significant apps like TwitterPlay that matches the day’s trending topics on twitter with songs with relevant lyrics via MusiXMatch, to potentially revolutionary consumer touring programs like Jennie’s Ultimate Road Trip that allows users to plot a road trip based on bands that are playing in various cities along the way, every application invented over the weekend (really in the period of 24 hours) is pure genius. Joe Rothermich even came up with the idea for an application that uses a song's danceability index as a stock market performance indicator! Even more impressive, of the record 41 apps designed, many are already close to being market ready. We at Indie Ambassador were fortunate enough to attend the event in person, and have listed our five favorite creations below. The entire list of winners can be viewed here. Let us know your favorites in the comments!
-Aidan
It’s a question that has haunted humankind for generations: Should I go see the band that’s opening for the band I really want to see tonight, or should I stay at the bar around the corner, sipping less expensive beer in comfort until my faves take the stage? Show Preview examines your musical preferences via Last.fm, finds your location, determines which bands are playing near you that night using SongKick and serves up 30-seconds via 7digital of the hottest tracks by the opening band as tracked by The Echo Nest’s “hottness” attribute.
Jennie Lamere — daughter of The Echo Nest’s Paul Lamere — had the idea to plot a road trip based on the bands that are playing in various locations along the way. So Lamere built it. He compared the process to the Traveling Salesman Problem, often examined by computer engineers, which involves calculating the optimal route for a traveling salesman. Except in this case, the bands are moving too, which complicates the issue considerably. To build this web app, Lamere mashed a city database from the web with Songkick’s live events API, The Echo Nest’s Personal Catalogs API, and Google Maps.
I’ve seen plenty of tools for mining Twitter for music but none of them do anything like what TwitterPlay does. This app takes the most popular trending topics on Twitter, searches MusiXMatch for songs that include those topics in their lyrics, and then assembles a playlist from 7digital’s catalog using The Echo Nest’s track search. If you’re looking for topical tunes that jibe with the events of the day this may very well be your only option.
Invisible Instruments – Guitar
By making use of the accelerometers and tilt-detectors in the iPhone and Wii remote, Invisible Instruments – Guitar allows the player to shred without a guitar, while enjoying a decent degree of control over what chords and notes get played. It’s just like air guitar, but noisier.
For most of us, mash-ups are something other people make for us to enjoy (or not to enjoy, as the case may be). HazMash gives regular civilians the ability to create their own mash-ups in real-time by dragging samples into a moving timeline, with the beats syncing up automatically. Even with all of those moving parts, this web app, powered by The Echo Nest API’s Remix feature, relies only on HTML5, CSS, and Javascript.
