Evolver.fm has itself evolved; its editor edits Spotify Insights, which explores music and how people listen to it through data, while Evolver.fm focuses mostly on the music hacking scene (Music Hack Day projects and other next-generation ideas). If you know about a music hack or fledgling app we might want to cover, please send us a tip. The winter break…
Over the course of a single November weekend, Hannah Robertson, Russell McClellan, and Matt Jardine were not romping around in piles of leaves. Nor were they taking it easy on the couch, bowling, or headed somewhere for a weekend getaway. Instead, they spent the weekend building something truly impressive at Music Hack Day Boston earlier this month. Their creation,…
For many, the word “hackathon” conjures, if anything, caffeinated techies coding away in competition, because hackathon prizes can be substantial, as can the glory that accompanies a win. In late July at Spotify headquarters, a different kind of hackathon took place: the New Musical Instruments Hackathon, part of the Monthly Music Hackathon series, where the goal was not to win over the…
Many objects that play recorded music have screens. Sometimes the screen plays a music video, but mostly it displays helpful — if static — information about what’s playing. The possibilities for depicting music visually are much wider, given the surfeit of music data that is available for, and/or can be generated from, literally any recorded song in…
America’s Soundtrack won’t teach you everything about U.S. history, but it presents some key moments through the lens of popular music — 31 songs about historical events that actually happened on a nifty interactive timeline. This interactive web app, hacked together by Mark Stoughton (Mistake Pointer-Outer for Evolver.fm publisher The Echo Nest, a subsidiary of Spotify), places…
Socks that vibrate to music. Artist playlists based on your tweets and your weather. A visualizer that reacts not only to the music that’s playing, but also to your flailing hands. Music Hack Day San Francisco — the latest stop on the ongoing, global Music Hack Day tour — was the place to see these…
Turntable.fm, whose launch was originally reported here, was an amazing, first-of-its-kind web app that nobody uses anymore, because it flamed out and people moved on. The problem with this group listening app, which let a handful of people choose music for everyone in the room, with everyone represented as cute little avatars in an actual room…
Artists often find inspiration in their surroundings. Unless they are quick to jot down their ideas, those can be lost forever. This is precisely why some recording artists use the notepad functions of their smartphones and tablets to capture song ideas and lyrics, although that approach fails to take advantage of the fact that the…
Ten years ago, we spent much of our seated time staring at computers and televisions. Now we get to stumble around staring at smartphones, too. But if I’m right, the future won’t be all about staring at screens, in part because the same sort of democratization and specialization that has transformed the software industry is…
Audiophiles make easy targets for mockery, the way they spend hundreds or thousands on speaker wire, when a blind listening test once famously revealed the humble coat hanger to be a suitable substitute (at least over short distances). Sometimes, an electron is just an electron. But not everything about the audiophile way is hooey. Speakers…
You might have played Patatap last week as it made its way around email, Facebook, Twitter, and other avenues. If you haven’t, you probably should. People like this “portable animation and sound kit” that lets you “create melodies charged with moving shapes” on a touchscreen web browser (phone or tablet) or on a computer. In terms…
Once a year, the South By Southwest music, tech, and film festival draws huge crowds of people from all over the world, sometimes contributing as much as a third of all of Austin’s revenue for the entire year. Last year (the most recent for which numbers are available), SXSW drew 155,000 people who “injected more…
