At this past weekend’s TVnext Hack event, a loose consortium of geeks, hackers, and businessmen from the television and technology industries gathered in a high-rise Boston office building to compete for cash and prizes by inventing and building technologies that add to the experience of watching television. Several hacks won prizes from sponsor companies, while…
Hackers, coders, and clever people gathered on a beautiful weekend at Hill Holiday‘s well-appointed, high-rise headquarters in downtown Boston for TVnext Hack, a weekend-long competition to build the neatest television stuff out of a APIs from ESPN, Gracenote, GetGlue, The Echo Nest (which publishes Evolver.fm), Ramp, WatchWith, and Viggle. This being a television hack day, not every app…
Although it was designed to help the people who put music into television shows find more tunes to match the mood of their show, Curation Station, one of the hacks to emerge from TVnext Hack 2013 this weekend, also works just fine as a method for extending your taste from television to music. Simply enter the…
We have already established that music apps can be brutal in the heavy metal sense of the term, but nothing prepared us for the brutality of an app that “destroys” pop music, including that of teen pop sensation Justin Bieber, by turning the vocals into a death metal-style growl. Sadly, there is no public version of…
Apparently, it is possible to cobble together some APIs over the weekend to make an iOS app that takes a picture of an object, then plays a song about that object. That is precisely what Martino Bonfiglioli and Christian Zanin (both of musiXMatch) did at Music Hack Day Paris this past weekend. Their creation, Camera…
The following is a guest post from Paul Lamere’s MusicMachinery about the Artist’s Hack at SXSW, which was the first Music Hack Day specifically designed to unite musicians and techies. Lamere is director of developer platform for The Echo Nest, which publishes Evolver.fm, and is a Music Hack Day wizard (see also: Infinite Gangnam Style, Bohemian…
Music Hack Days, where techies take time off from their freelance gigs and day jobs to build all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff out of APIs and hardware, are lots of fun — in part because the point isn’t to make a commercial release. It’s to make something cool. That doesn’t mean something cool…
When you put words on Twitter, those words become data. Twitter has an API. You know what would be cool? To turn that data into music. Why not? To be clear, these apps are not for discovering music through Twitter (been there, done that). They actually incorporate Twitter — as in actual tweets — into…
Music Hack Day San Francisco 2013 — the latest iteration of this itinerant gathering of software- and hardware-hacking music technology wizards — happened this past weekend, while the rest of us were getting ready to be sad about whatever happened on Downton Abbey (don’t tell me). This list hasn’t been published anywhere I could find…
Wi-Fi desktop radios have been around for a while now. Most of them are lame. The one I have lets me surf a bunch of different internet radio stations on a tiny screen, bookmarking some of them as favorites. It’s like listening to internet radio on a computer ten years ago. These Wi-Fi enabled radios,…
As some of us enjoyed a long weekend, hardware hackers and software savants were building some of the future of music at Spotify’s worldwide headquarters for Music Hack Day Stockholm. These hardy souls turned out an impressive number of “hacks,” which are sort of like apps, except they were built over the course of a single…
For the uninitiated, “chiptunes” are 8-bit versions of songs that sound as if they were made for video game systems from two decades ago. A large underground community is dedicated chiptuning songs and, for the most part, creating original works using vintage consoles and computers (updated), but AutoChipTune just made the former whole process a lot…
Even if you weren’t around for the original Breakout videogame for Atari, in which the player controls a horizontal bar in order to bounce a ball against bricks in order to destroy them, ideally clearing the board and moving on, you just might remember the similar Brick game from the first iPods. It’s one of the…
Imagine if your personal theme song played every time you walked into a room. It would be sort of like being in an opera or ballet (in which characters often have themes or motifs associated with them), but in real life. With an intriguing app called Music: The Gathering, which Adam Ribaudo and his team built…
One of the stranger fruits born by Music Hack Day Boston this past weekend was Heart Beats, which mashes a heart rate-detecting watch with Max/MSP to control music’s tempo with the subject’s heartbeat. “Heart Beats continually modifies the tempo of your music to match your heart rate,” writes its creator Ryan Challinor. “Hopefully this won’t…
