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…
Music Hack Day Boston took place this past weekend. Unfortunately, our editor was on an ill-timed, long-ago-scheduled vacation, but other Evolver.fm staffers, including yours truly, were on hand to chronicle the festivities. If you’re not familiar with Music Hack Day, the event gives software developers and hardware hackers 24 hours to come up with an idea and…
Music Hack Day Reykjavik took place this weekend. We weren’t there, but we have been inspecting the creations that emerged from the event, and wow, are we ever impressed — not only by Infinite Gangnam Style, but by other stuff too. These people made some truly weird things, like Horsify, which contains some…
Paul Lamere, who earlier wrought havoc on Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” has trained his song-hacking sights on (what else?) “Gangnam Style,” the pop sensation from Korean popstar Psy that continues to sweep the globe and inspire awkward analogies. Update: It gets better. The awe-inspiring result: Infinite Gangnam Style, which anyone with a web browser (i.e. you, right…
We’re big fans of Music Hack Day events, because they’re such a clear demonstration of how one person plus APIs (application programming interfaces) can equal awesome. Don’t speak geek? Basically, this means that standing on the shoulders of giants works. If you sat down to make an encyclopedia of just about every band anyone’s ever…
Today is international “talk like a pirate day.” As such, we figure you should listen like a pirate. However, actual music piracy is so last decade. We recommend reading this post, originally published on August 23, for advice on how to listen like a music pirate — but legally, so you don’t get arrrrrrrrrested. –…
Music Hack Days, hackathons, hack battles, or whatever you want to call them are a real treat, if you’re the type of person who enjoys watching exceedingly clever people build functional music apps and hacks over the course of a single weekend, fueled by a heady mixture of caffeine, beer, and a healthy competitive spirit. They’re…
There are many ways to skin the music recommendation cat, so to speak. Record label EMI and Data Science London hope they have stumbled on to a new one: data sliced -and diced from interviews with one million music fans. The team behind the EMI Million Interview Dataset will release the self-reported musical taste of…
Yes, it’s true: I flew about 25 hours each way from New York to attend Music Hack Day Sydney last weekend, and have written up just about every app and hack to emerge from it over the course of the week. These Aussies and the occasional New Zealander or Englishman produced some really great hacks,…
