(UPDATED) From Cannes by Stuart Dredge for Midem content partner Music Ally. Find them at musically.com and @musically.
A hearty group of programmers were been holed up overnight at Midem building apps and hacks, as part of the Music Hack Day event. This morning, SoundCloud’s Dave Haynes and Six Two Productions’ Martyn Davies who have been overseeing it, took to the stage to show off a couple of examples to give a flavor of what’s been created.
First, Haynes talked about Music Hack Day. “Developers are crucial to the future of music,” he said. “They are really becoming a new gatekeeper.” Not in a bad way: creating new apps and ways for fans to discover new music and get deeper into the music by the artists that they love.
“Big labels like EMI and Universal Music are really seeing the value of Music Hack Day and providing assets,” he noted, before returning to the importance of developers. “These people are really building the future of music, not just talking about it.
The first example: TourrentPlans, which takes in data on where people are filesharing an artist’s music, then maps it against Songkick data on where they’re touring. The idea: helping bands decide where to tour based on where people are sharing their music (yes, illegally).
Ben Fields, the developer, showed some examples for Metallica, Devo and Lady Gaga – TourrentPlans turns the data into a map showing a possible tour itinerary based on the filesharing data.
The Echo Nest’s Paul Lamere was the second hacker to show off his work today. “We wanted to build something that was beautiful, so what we did was we took a song, we analysed it with The Echo Nest API that lets us break a song down into all the musical events… And we used that to drive an animation. Essentially building a virtual musical instrument that we could watch while it plays.”
It’s called Midem Music Machine, and the results do look beautiful, judging by the video that Lamere showed on-stage. “We do this all algorithmically, no humans are in the loop,” he noted.
A Full List Of Hacks:
- JPC2000 A browser based javascript drum machine named and styled after the famous Akai MPC2000
- MyNight A club night recommendation service with crowd sourcing dj playlist recording
- Artistify A Spotify app framework for bands & artists.
- Radiobed Is it bed time?
- Flatdrop Make it rain with Flattr & SoundCloud
- Midem Music Machine – Automatically generating beautiful visualizations of music
- SonicMuse – Sonic Visualiser and MuseScore married together
- LyricsPostcard – Creates a slideshow of picture, with music and synchronized lyrics
- Blind Search – Audio-only interface through the Million Song Dataset
- InstaSound – Add filters to your recording and upload it to SoundCloud
- Tourrent Plans – Plan your next tour with science!
- lively – Concert history stats for artists and for you!
- d Tweet dt – Which artists are being talked about now?
- Mixture – Discover music through pictures!
- Watch that score – Score following for audiences
- Interact – OpenEMI powered music interaction app
- Tune Hunt – Crowd-sourced hunt for hidden music treasures
- Badgify – Badge that displays what you are currently listening to
