“Big information” is everywhere you appear these days.
As digital info continues to expand exponentially, this impacts everything — how much we spend for health insurance,how we predict the weather, how we play the stock marketplace.
The music market is no exception. Large data is making music a a lot more meaningful and connected portion of our lives.
That might sound insane at 1st. “Music” and “data” really feel like polar opposites. Music is intimate, soulful, and organic. Information is cold and impersonal.
But exactly where music and information come together is in understanding the vast and always-growing planet of music: new artists, new influences, technology mashups, and discoveries. All of this music ultimately forges typical connections in between us all.
Large information, in a musical context, types the backbone of the Music Hack Day series, where music is not only represented as literal information (good old ones and zeroes), but each song, artist, and album is also surrounded by all sorts of context and understanding that open up mind-blowing new approaches for us to uncover, interact with, and share music.
Music Hack Days bring together APIs from The Echo Nest, Spotify, SoundCloud, and other digital music platforms so that hundreds of software and hardware hackers can develop functional music apps and demonstrate them to each and every other over the course of a single weekend, in cities around the world.
My firm, The Echo Nest, has spent seven years creating the globe’s largest music database, which contains much more than 5 billion individual data points about 30 million songs and a lot more than 2 million artists.
Half of The Echo Nest’s “musical brain” is devoted to understanding music content — analyzing audio with software to comprehend it the way a musician does (tempo, important, song structure, and so on.). The other half parses what folks are saying about music everywhere on-line (blogs, reviews, news, social media).
Together, this understanding of music allows independent developers to build scalable music apps with key labels and produce all sorts of stuff they wouldn’t otherwise be in a position to create.
Imagine what you could make if you knew the tempo and song structure of every single song in the planet if you knew what everyone on the Web is saying about each artist in the globe appropriate now if you knew the musical collaborations and influences of everyone to ever choose up a guitar.
At Music Hack Day, hundreds of developers have all of this information and millions of songs sitting correct in front of them. At the San Francisco Music Hack Day just last week, a lot more than two hundred participants built a total of 62 working music hacks. That is a ridiculous rate of productivity, and the apps show why big information matters to any music fan.
Here are some of the highlights from San Francisco Music Hack Day (in alphabetical order — and keep in mind, these are rough, time-limited hackathon projects that will most likely be acquiring several layers of polish ahead of a public release):
- Automello takes any group of audio samples and groups them by pitch so digital music makers can play them like a piano.
- Buddhafy lets you develop a Spotify playlist with your brain, based on its mood.
- Coming to Town Rdio lists concerts coming to your region and lets you hear what those bands sound like.
- Echo Tunes takes a appear at your iTunes library, then lets you create playlists with all sorts of intelligent sliders Apple never ever thought of including.
- Frankie’s Organ translates any song into a pipe organ version, played by a virtual Frankenstein.
- GenRedio makes radio stations based on a mixture of moods and musical designs.
- Hide That Tune is a new twist on the familiar “name that tune” game. 1 player select an arcane section of a well-known song and challenges the others to identify it.
- Lyrics Cloud builds “word clouds” based on any song, so you can see which terms pop up most in the lyric.
- Make Up Recs lets non-techies import playlists from Pandora into the unfamiliar world of the strong Tomahawk music app, without skipping a beat.
- Paul vs. Billboard predicted 6 of 13 Grammy Award winners with artificial intelligence.
- PlayHead plays customized radio stations based on the cities and bands you like.
- SideTrack, strictly for the geeks, is like a digital Rube Goldberg contraption whose point is to uncover music through incredibly circuitous routes.
- SocialSongQ lets individuals send tweets to the artificially-intelligent “DJ Fail Whale” generating a queue of songs to hear at any event.
- Sonos+Spotify++ adds wise playlisting and the potential to acquire tickets to Sonos’ digital music technique for the residence.
- WetheDJ lets you invite close friends to create party playlists together.
Music Hack Day is meant to be enjoyable. It’s essentially a jam session for developers held over a weekend. The reality that these talented hackers can put together so several functional apps in 24 hours utilizing The Echo Nest, Soundcloud, Last.fm, and dozens of other fantastic music APIs has main implications for corporations and consumers, for how we will all uncover, play, and share music in the future.
Jim Lucchese is CEO of The Echo Nest and has worked in digital music strategy and corporate development for about 10 years. Before The Echo Nest, Jim was a music lawyer at Greenberg Traurig, specializing in music and digital media deals. Jim holds a B.A. from Boston College and a J.D., Magna Cum Laude, from the Georgetown University Law Center. When he’s not at the Nest, Jim plays drums and still represents a few indie artists pro bono for enjoyable.
Image courtesy of Yuri Arcurs, Shutterstock
Filed under: dev 
