Data Visualization is a fundamental tool for understanding our increasingly data-oriented world. What can visualization of sound data teach us about musical concepts like pitch, rhythm, and timbre? And, conversely, might we gain a deeper understanding of data by translating it into sound, rather than images? The Sound Visualization & Data Sonification Hackathon had two…
Wait for it, wait for it… there. Now let’s hear it again! That’s what people do quite a bit, as demonstrated by the following video of The Drop Machine, built by music hack day legend and director of developer community for The Echo Nest at Spotify Paul Lamere at Midem Hack Day. His creation finds the parts of…
On Saturday, May 23, Spotify USA’s New York headquarters will host a weekend-long exploration into melody and harmony. Here are the full details, courtesy of the event’s organizer, Monthly Music Hackathon: “Come learn about and hack on recent research on automated extraction of melody and harmony from audio, melody and harmony datasets, experimental music generation, music…
This is a guest post from insights.spotify.com, which is edited by the editor of this site. Music fans, prepare to lose a few minutes. Possibly hours. The latest in time-sucking music data entertainment: ‘Genres In Their Own Words’ This is a massive list that pairs over 1400 genres with the words that are most distinctive to the…
Did you torment a younger sibling with a broken Teddy Ruxpin growling, “I want to be your friend,” again and again, as its cassette tape unraveled and its cheap electronics melted? Did the cheesy sound effects of your toys and the gritty music of early video games get you fired up to play? Some of…
If he ever got out of here, Bob Seger was going to Kathmandu. Katy Perry woke up broke in Vegas. Paul Simon followed the river down the highway through the cradle of the Civil War to Graceland, Memphis Tennessee. You can find these and hundreds of other songs about places on Spotimap, a fun, playable map audiographic that…
In this guest post, Spotify engineer and music hacker/composer extraordinaire Jonathan Marmor recounts representing Spotify at a massive hackathon held at the University of Pennsylvania from January 16-18, where high-level student technology creators from around the globe made some amazing things using APIs including those of Spotify and subsidiary The Echo Nest, publisher of…
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…
