The Music Hack Day series, where exceedingly clever software types gather to build functional music apps in a single weekend, has been many things to many people in its two-year-plus history. But one thing it had never been until this past weekend was Canadian.
Music Hack Day Montreal spawned 24 music hacks, whose creators, like those before them, created powerful apps in such a short time in part standing on the shoulders of big data APIs (application programming interfaces), which allow them to incorporate advanced functionality without having to build everything from scratch.
Here’s what participants made at Music Hack Day Montreal (courtesy of the wiki). Some of these apps aren’t yet ready for public use, but some interesting ideas emerged as usual:
- The Wub Machine (v2) - Automatic Dubstep and Electro House (and more) remixer (powered by the Echo Nest [publisher of Evolver.fm])
- MP3 Steganography - Hiding an MP3 inside another one
- Music Tags Live prediction - Predicting and displaying descriptive tags as the song plays
- CloudSound - Generating music based on the weather forecast
- Projet Chorale - Subverting public space via augmented (AR) sound and image intervention
- Tomahawk Catalog Radio - Sync your music collection with the echo nest’s catalogs, and listen to customized radio mixed with radios from your friends. As a bonus, play them from grooveshark.
- Search for music by drawing a picture of it - Draw a picture, find some music
- wuzhear - Audible, historical timeline of past concerts for each music venue in Montreal
- DJ Hal - Playlist steering by ambient metrics of human activity
- The Beatbox Machine - Beatbox into your mic and have your beat replaced with real drums.
- 6strings - Guitar synthesis in the browser
- Grid Pie - Renoise cut and pastry.
- Sound Toy - Sound toy in the browser.
- HangArtist - How good do you know hot artists?
- EchoFight - Your friend’s artist is better than yours? Yeah, right.
- jSongMiner - Metadata mining for libraries and pattern recognition.
- Echocrypt - An encryption algorithm based on data retrieved using the echonest API.
- The Echo NES - Beat-synchronized NES hacking
- to pcm - what your browser hears
- free assembly - adapt a collection of sounds to a target using echonest Remix and freesound.org APIs
- FaCeQuencer - Multi-genre camera-based looper/sequencer
- SCERONE - Korg ER-1 Rhythm machine – Synth Controller.
- Model2 wind instrument model - Wind instrument physical model in VST plug-in format.
- Mood Mapping Song Generator - Make a mashup by drawing an emotion contour
We’ll take a closer look at some of these apps soon, so stay tuned.