Music Hack Day London 2013: the hacks and the winners

Music Hack Day London 2013: the hacks and the winners

The 5th Music Hack Day London unfolded this weekend (7th/8th of December 2013) at the Shoreditch Village Hall. The event started in the summer of 2009 by bringing together hackers (i.e. developers) from all over the world interested in the music/audio space and was made possible by an ever-increasing number of accessible data points (via APIs - Application Programming Interfaces) offered by companies like Last.fm, SoundCloud and The Echo Nest. The scope of Music Hack Day has since expended significantly with events all over the world. 

If you've never heard of a Hack Day before the developers have 24 to 36 hours to create a brand new "hack" - usually as part of a team - which gets presented at the end. Hacking often continues through the night so coffee, red bull and beer are staples of the event.

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So after all this time is there still creative hacking to be done? The answer is a definite yes. The venue was packed with developers as well as a few hands-on musicians and the event produced no less than 52 hacks which were showcased on Sunday afternoon in a three-hour hugely entertaining marathon of presentations.

This year’s Music Hack Day highlighted the importance of physical hacks: whilst back in 2009 almost all the hacks were purely software-based this year 15 of the 52 projects had a strong physical component to them, whether interacting with an external controller, sensor or a command triggered via webcam-based interactions.

The interest in physical hacks is also demonstrated by the list of winning projects, with four out of six having a strong “real life” component to them. So let’s start with the winners, aptly selected thanks to a "voting hack" system powered by text messages and open to anyone at the event. 

- LifeSound: crowned the overall winner in this year’s event. The hack by Ben Nunney, founder of The Time Machine which a moving museum of Tech History, used an 80’s Amstrad 1512  computer to generate your “Life Music” based on answers to deep, meaningful life questions like “How many pets do you have?” and “Do you like Justin Bieber?."

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- Leap Motion DJ Console: the Leap Motion hand tracking device launched to the general public in the summer to mixed reviews due to the lack of useful real-life applications. The Leap Motion DJ Console hack successfully allows users to mix a track with your hands: each gesture is assigned a specific controller. The hack seemed to work really smoothly on the Leap which is not something you see every day!

- BeatSlap: aiming the be the "Hot or Not" of music the application took playlists curated by celebrities and asked users to vote on which fit best a specific situation. If you get it wrong a virtual hand gets closer and closer to your virtual face until you get "Beatlsapped"! Try it out here.

- Beer hear: we're all sick of terrible beers being served at live music venues (at least here in London). BeerHear fetches your upcoming gigs from your Songkick username, then shows you which beers are available at the venues you're going to visit and if the selection is not to your satisfaction allows you to tweet the venue an angry but relatively polite letter requesting better beer! Try it out here.

- Hipster Robot: drawing one of the biggest cheers of the afternoon (after all we all love some robot action) Hipster Robot uses an electronic arm (and a cheap one at that as highlighted by the developer) to prevent you from listening from any music by the most popular 100 artists online. The hack checks if the music you were listening to is TOO popular and in that case the Hipster Robot swings into action by pressing the space bar on your keyboard thus stopping the insanity!

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- Techno Tree: in spite of a demo fail that severed all sensor connections on stage, Techno Tree got to be in the top six thanks to the awesome idea behind it. Claiming to be "The World's Most Over-Engineered Christmas Tree" Techno Tree allowed for speech-to-screen present requests to Santa (which appeared on faux-presents/monitors at the bottom of the tree and had sensors appended to the tree/baubles to create a music remix). Featuring a techno remix of white christmas the idea - if productised - could be a must have item for Christmas 2014…

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Another interesting running theme at the hack day was that of collaborative hacks which involved the simultaneous participation of the crowd. Amongst them Playsongsto.me, a collaborative playlist tool with the added incentive of having to keep adding tracks to avoid Justin Bieber's "Baby" playing ad infinitum, MuseScore a live collaboration allowing several people to edit a music score at the same time, The Massively Multiplayer Piano challenging you to play chords as part of a virtual team with the added rule that only one note can be played at a time and SharedBeat, a synchronised synthesiser where different people can be assigned their own instruments but play together (this is the perfect office collaboration tool - check it out here).

Amongst the other hacks Attention Deficit Radio is definitely worth a mention, programmed to create a Pandora-like experience for music listeners with short attention spans (and with some fabulous remix results, warning this is pretty addictive). You can try it out here
Finally Trojan Radio was another great hardware hack where an old-school AM/FM radio was transformed into a wifi enabled one broadcasting sounds from Soundcloud and Last.fm radio. The added comedic element was that this was one of the developer's mums radio who just wanted it fixed, so no more Radio 2 for her….

MusicHackDay 2013 was another successful and most importantly fun event maintaining its core mission of being a great way for developers to have a blast, collaborate and learn. In this piece of course I could only mention a small fraction of the 52 hacks that were presented and I'd encourage you to go check out the full list here

 



(Andrea Leonelli)
Photos by Thomas Bronte