First, a quick set-up of why Music Hack Day was valuable to me – somebody who is no longer a developer.
Most of what I do is labeled with a pairing of letters. IA/UX/ID/BA (information architect, user experience, interaction designer, business analyst). Regardless of titles, each role requires me to know what is possible, what isn’t possible, and what will be possible when developing an application/experience.
What can I design for? When an application is developed, what are the pieces that make it work and how do those pieces work together? What are we programming this thing in and what are the limitations? Is it actually usable and how do we track this? … and lastly, how can I communicate all of this to the developer, designer, client, and end user?
In the agency world you have to master these questions/answers for a variety of audiences and platforms as they are ever-changing on a project to project basis. Focusing the above questions/roles in one niche category is an aspiration of mine and is what drew me to the event.
This past weekend I was able to relax a bit and focus on two of my favorite things, music + application development, at the Boston Music Hack Day. London, Berlin, and Amsterdam hosted events earlier this year. The next is in Stockholm in January 2010. Though this is a music and development focused event, the methods and analytics practiced reach outside the realm of music+tech. Besides hacking, there were circuit bending workshops and panels on Music Discovery and the Future of Music, with members from Last.fm, LimeWire, The Hype Machine, Songkick, Pitchfork, and more. [ panel list ]
Music Hack Day, defined.
“A full weekend of music hacking. Software + hardware + art + the web. Come build the future of music.” … or now popularly dubbed “A Dungeons & Dragons conference for music geeks.”
User / Data Analysis and APIs
In a previous life I used Director (and lots of Lingo + Xtras!), Max/MSP, midi+animation, external controllers, etc. to manipulate the sound and signals that midi carries. But now there is so much more to consider, manipulate, and most importantly, to analyze in this medium. Music is a choice medium since there are so many datapoints to play with, manipulate, visualize, etc. Two of the high-level aspects of this are as follows:
1. There is the community aspect: providing a tool to users, sharing, feeding recommendations, tracking user behavior based on playing habits, serving up related content and like-minded users…
2. The next part (where my mind is blown) is the more detailed analysis of data: Spectral and textual, the psychoacoustic way that the brain perceives music, key and time signature, mode, pitch, timbre, harmonic content, structural aspects of how the score is segmented… [ wow, The Echo Nest ]
What is really exciting (and the main focus of a Music Hack Day) is what happens when you make the APIs public to developers who want to find ways of making 1 benefit from 2 or vice versa. What happens when we introduce resolver frameworks or simply stretch the boundaries of the APIs, tools, and data we use every day?
Thank you Music Hack Day for opening my mind again to what is and will be possible in this space. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what I learned, the inspiring people I met, and the things I want to create. I skipped over a bunch, but wanted to recap briefly from my perspective. To learn more about what is being done in music + tech see the links below.
Hack entries, winners, and in-progress
http://musichackdayboston.pbworks.com/Projects
a couple of my favorites:
Outlier.fm
http://musichackdayboston.pbworks.com/Outlier-FM
http://www.outlierfm.com/
Paul’s Music Wreckomender
http://musichackdayboston.pbworks.com/Paul%27s-Music-Wreckommender
http://playlist.echonest.com/Wreckommender/
Companies to watch and tools to use (if you aren’t already)
there are so many more, so check the MHD site.
The Echo Nest
http://www.echonest.com/
Playdar
http://www.playdar.org/
SoundCloud
http://soundcloud.com/
Last.fm
http://www.last.fm/
Noteflight
http://www.noteflight.com/
Thank Yous
A big thanks to the following for putting on such an awesome and inspiring event: Jon Pierce of @betahouse (@jonpierce), Paul Lamere of Echo Nest (@plamere), Elissa Barrett (@elissab), Dave Haynes of SoundCloud (@haynes_dave), Brian Whitman of Echo Nest (@bwhitman), Echo Nest (@echonest), and Microsoft for the great facilities.
Also, special thanks to friends Tim Heineke (@theineke) and Marcel Corso (@marcelcorso) of Twones for being my buddies for the weekend. I now know where to find an emergency endodontist in boondocks Massachusetts on a Sunday.
word/phrases of the days
crab core, scrobble, content resolver, put a donk on it
shameless plug
http://soundcloud.com/hollyhabstritt
my not so great pictures from the event
My Boston Music Hack Day Flickr Set
