Music Hack Day San Francisco took over the offices of tokbox this past weekend for two days of getting creative with digital music. The results, as always with Music Hack Days, were a mix of the practical and the absurd.
Every Music Hack Day — part of an ongoing series of events around the world — offers participants 24 hours to conjure up inventive new ways of interacting with music with the aid of technology. Last year’s San Francisco event saw engineer Robb Böhnke recreate Winamp within Spotify as an app. Here are some of our favourites from this year’s event:
LSD
Taking the idea of the collaborative playlist and applying it to visualisations, LSD “allows people in the audience to control the visuals projected on stage at concerts and festivals, all using their smartphones,” explains creator Tyler F. Each visualization acts as a kind of room — people can log onto the site, join in, and take control of visual effects. Even better, they can add in visuals that they’ve recorded on their phones and add them to the mix.
Tweet Concrète
This jokingly pretentious offering from Ryan Fitzgerald generates short sonic collages based on randomly selected tweets from your account. Think of them as tweet soundtracks that last as long as each tweet takes to read. Or, if that doesn’t take your fancy, then why not try…
Nightingale
Apparently, Nightingale ”crawls through your Twitter stream and matches keywords and phrases to song lyrics by utilising text processing and sentiment analysis” to deliver an “amazing playlist” that matches the mood of your tweets. While the bar for “amazing” is set at an unclear height (and every playlist seemed to have a Black Eyed Peas song in it on our tests), it’s pretty good at picking stuff on Spotify that goes with the taste of each tweeter.
The Bonhamizer
If you’ve ever found yourself wondering what a song might sound like if it had been recorded with John Bonham on drums, look no further — Paul Lemere’s Bonhamizer is just the ticket. Lets you upload a song and choose from four types of Bonham — “Basic Bonham,” “Hammer of the Gods,” “Double Time Shuffle,” and “Bonham Shuffle.”
Code Music
This site, from Daniel Imrie-Situnayake and Ryan Brown, turns valid JavaScript into music by mapping the “structure, nesting and errors contained within” onto a compositional waveform.
Soundvine
Matt Montag’s Soundvine lets you pair up your Vines with a track of your choosing, control the playback speed, and generally “remix” the looping video/audio format. Lots of the Music Hack Day projects focus on Spotify and Twitter, but it’s likely that Vine will become equally important over time as the format grows in popularity.
LazyListen
If you’ve ever wanted to be able to listen to Pandora without having the stress of having to use your hands to say you love certain tracks, Peter Watts’ LazyListen will help with just that. Using your computer’s webcam, the radio will stop playing if you get up and leave — and if you “rock out” to a track, it’ll automatically give it a thumbs-up.
Tweedio
Possibly perfect for parties, Tweedio (from Justin Mahon and Sean Po) lets people text or tweet to add songs to a collaborative playlist. Not only can new songs be added, but songs already on the playlist can be pushed up so they come on sooner.
Homebrew Hardware Intersects With Sweet Sounds at Music Hack Day San Francisco
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Homebrew Hardware Intersects With Sweet Sounds at Music Hack Day San Francisco
