Music Hackday 2009

This video captures impressions from Music Hackday 2009, a hand-on music technology hacking event held July 11-12 at the Guardian Offices in Kings Cross, London.

Organizers created Music Hackday because "European music sites are revolutionising the music industry, not least with their eagerness to open up their data with APIs (application programming interfaces)."

Examples of the hacks coming out of the event include:

• Music Zeitgeist - a Wordle visualisation of the music lyrics for the last 6 decades.
• MusicBore - plays you music and tells you ALL about it, with information from the BBC, Last.fm, Linked Data and other sources.
• SpaceBass - a retro scrolling shooter where gameplay modifies music and music modifies gameplay in a glorious feedback loop.
• TrippyAudioWaves - a bunch of 1-inch square circuit boards, each producing a drone sequence of musical pitches that sound nice together. When you wave your hand over them, the effect is a wave of different droning pitches that follow your hand (and sound trippy!)
• CloudPost - a Mac desktop audio uploader for SoundCloud. It integrates the users address-book & allows fast private sharing of tracks. With a last minute hax0r extension, it also lets you save music directly from any music app (e.g. Garageband) directly to SoundCloud.
• Theremag - a theremin emulator running on an Android device, using the built-in magnetometer and a magnet for control.

A full rundown of the hacks that were created at the event is available at the MusicHackDay site.

If you attended Music Hack Day, leave a comment with your thoughts about the event!

Video: Chameleonic

More Information

• MusicHackDay

James Lewin
Twitter @podcasting_news

• Five Epic IKEA Music Hacks 20-Oct-09
• First Look At BeatSneaks Musical Shoes 26-Jul-09
• The Augmented Reality DJ System 20-Jul-09
• The Prism Laser Guitar 19-Jul-09