24 Projects Emerge out of Music Hack Day
This past weekend, musicians, developers, and hackers from as far away as Germany gathered at a Montréal venue called The Eastern Bloc to “build the future of music applications.”
The event is called a “Music Hack Day” and loosely organized and held several times per year in various cities around the world. This past weekend was the first held in Canada.
Fueled by coffee and bagels and using programming tools from music tech startups such as The Echonest, Grooveshark, Soundcloud, and Renoise, the participants built 24 new, interesting, and often weird applications in just 24 hours.
For example, the crowd favorite project, FaCeQuencer by Bruno Angeles, used video from the webcam to change the genre of a music loop and outfit the user’s face to match the genre: moustache for country, dark sunglasses for jazz, and so on. Other projects were more practical, for example, wuzhear, a project from a team of students from McGill, shows a map of concert venues with list of past concerts going back to 1980 with playable set lists. Very cool.
You can see all the projects here: http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=Montreal_2011_Hacks.
Trevor Knight is a Master of Engineering Student at McGill university. His research interests include human-computer interaction, music information retrieval, analysis and visualization of music and novel musical interfaces.
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