The Echo Nest Hearts Music Hack Day SF 2013

February 18 5:43pm

This past weekend, The Echo Nest helped put on another exciting Music Hack Day in technology hub San Francisco, where we expected a great turnout of creative, intelligent folks united by an urge to invent the future in the form of ambitious music projects ranging from the ridiculous to the practical.

As always, they did this all in a single weekend while most normal people were busy relaxing. Once the dust had settled, they had conceived, implemented, and demonstrated 66 music hacks — about a third of which relied on The Echo Nest’s technology.

We also ate pizza. Lots of it. Pictures below.

It’s never easy to pick which apps should win our prizes at these Music Hack Days, especially when the projects were so great (cases in point: an advanced group listening room, a tie piano, a way to turn your face into a theme song, and a gestural dubstep orchestra).

We gave away a new iPad and a new iPad Mini. The winners:

Biscuit Orchestra by John Wang

“Conduct an orchestra of many devices playing music together simultaneously.”

Inspiration by JT Bowler

“A web application that provides example chord progressions to jam over for various musical genres. It will also gather a playlist of audio samples in that genre to provide inspiration for the jam.”

Other notable projects from Music Hack Day SF 2013 that used The Echo Nest: 

• Friendsound: “A web app for collaborative music listening, discovery, and mixing.”
• SongActive: “Quantifed self for music.” (It shows how your music listening relates to your GitHub check-ins.)
• OpenHarmonic, Variation No. 1: ”Classical Music for Insane People”
• Gordie Howe Hat Trick: “In honor of Hockey Weekend in America, a hockey player theme song selection engine based on player place stats and biographical information.” We believe this to be the first every hockey-oriented music hack.

This is how you feed an army of hackers (thanks to MailChimp):

Above: The Echo Nest’s Mark Stoughton is a tall man — even taller than this pizza.

Extreme Pizza is really good.

Music hackers, powered by The Echo Nest and Extreme Pizza, do their thing in San Francisco.

Photos: The Echo Nest