#music hackathon

[musichackathon]

Remote Music Hackathon Recap

On May 23rd, Music Community Lab held our first Remote Music Hackathon to explore the creative potential of remote music collaboration.

The day began with a live stream of lightning talks to inspire hackers, with timestamped links below.

Talks

▶️ Bashiri Johnson, percussion artist - "Rhythm Healing: How Rhythm and Creativity can be a consciousness raiser, motivator, and call for action." Bashiri Johnson is one of the most visible and recorded percussionists on the planet. Bashiri has added his highly sought after style of percussion to a myriad of hit records, commercials, films, TV, games and live performances across all musical genres. He has recorded and/or performed with Beyonce, Miles Davis, Madonna, Queen, Herbie Hancock, and many other artists. https://www.bashirijohnson.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashiri...

▶️ Katya Lipovetsky , founder at Katya and brand ambassador at Sofar Sounds - "Music Vs. Virus: Online music festival" How I started the first online music festival in 24 hours with over 40 musicians (across the US, Europe and Israel) and 3 collaborations with music start-ups. What are the various opportunities created in the music community due to the pandemic? How have music start-ups reacted to the music community going online? How will musicians respond to the crisis? https://www.facebook.com/events/s/mus... https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-way...

▶️ Iky Castilho & Bryan Velasco w/ Doni Clemons - "Creating an International Music Studio" A talk between two musicians, one American and one Brazilian, both award-winning, describing the techniques they use to create songs when collaborating from their respective home countries. https://www.instagram.com/ikycastilho/ https://www.instagram.com/justbryanmusic https://www.dclemons.com/

▶️ Damon Holzborn & John O’Brien - "Exquisite Coast - Asynchronous Musical Collaboration Through Patch Sharing" Exquisite Coast is a shared patch game that results in a series of solo pieces using the Make Noise 0-Coast semi-modular synthesizer. We’ll talk about the rules of the game and what we’ve learned during 6+ weeks of remote collaboration. https://ec.rustle.works/hackathon https://damonholzborn.com https://rustleworks.com Facebook/Twitter: @damonholzborn https://johnmobrien.com https://www.newmusicusa.org/profile/j...

▶️ Kris Gilbert, educator - "How to Create a Virtual Ensemble" The trials and tribulations of creating a virtual ensemble, the software to get the job done, and a quick overview of how to do it. Website: krisgilbertmusic.com YouTube: Kris the Uke Chick Gilbert (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJBI...) Facebook/Twitter: @conductorchik https://tinyurl.com/virtualensemble

▶️ David Wilson, founder of JamKazam, "Playing music together in realtime with JamKazam." Founded in 2012, the platform had a relatively cult following until the global pandemic. The founder of JamKazam will join for a short discussion of how JamKazam works, some of the challenges involved in playing music together over the internet in real-time, and a preview of the JamKazam Music Festival coming up on May 30 featuring seven full bands performing live in-sync over the internet. https://jamkazam.com https://facebook.com/jamkazam

▶️ Justin Frankel, musician, programmer, inventor and founder - Q&A with the creator of REAPER, NINJAM, Winamp, Gnutella, Shoutcast https://reaper.fm https://www.ninjam.com/

Workshops

In the afternoon we had three amazing workshops:

Raq Robinson, creator of HotPlay, a new music chat app, covered the inspiration and approach to the app's development as well as a how-to on creating a simple starting point WebSocket template using Socket.io and Node.js. iamraq.github.io

Chris Johnston, creator of J.A.M. (Join a Metronome) is an online metronome designed to play music together (remotely) on live streaming platforms for an audience. The workshop began with an overview of how it works, and then will branch into two tracks: one for musicians to play together using joinametronome.com, and the other for developers to hack on the codebase.

Erin Gee & Jen Kutler, composers and sound artists, How-To: Touch Music. Discover how two artists are reimagining sound as a way to send touch and embodied data to friends during social distancing. Learn more about their open-source software and hardware circuits ranging from affective bio-sensing to networked data transfer in order to create your own intimate feedback loops with friends. jenkutler.com | eringee.net

Hack Demos & Performances

At the end of the day, we had a concert of hack demos and performances of music and music-related projects created by remote collaborators over the course of the day. The live streamed demos are available here.

[musichackathon]

Experiential Music Hackathon Recap

On February 22nd, we explored music beyond the auditory at the Experiential Music Hackathon. It was a fantastic day of talks, workshops, hacking and performances held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard offices of Weav Music.

Talks

Jay Alan Zimmerman, a composer, author, and multimedia artist, came up with the original concept for this event and led the organizing. As a composer who has become deaf, and co-creator of projects like Google’s Seeing Music, his opening talk set the stage for a day that aimed to make music more inclusive by enhancing the experience for everyone.

Kon Tsitsas, Adaptive Music Specialist at Weav Music, described their process for designing adaptive, interactive music experiences like Weav Run.

Allen Riley presented works like Electronic Internet, sonification of internet browsing, and the Dream Car, a sound and light environment inspired by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House.

He also brought Videofreak, a music and video synthesizer in the form of an arcade cabinet, from its home at the Death By Audio Arcade. Participants explored the “experiential game” throughout the day.

Johann Diedrick (aquiet.life) described how attuning our hearing to environmental sounds can inspire new ways of music making. From a workshop building aeolian harps to be played by the wind, to projects like the bird classifier at Newtown Creek, mobile listening kit and harvester.

Yago de Quay (meetgraviton.com) described how technologies such as gesture and brain wave sensors can turn the body and mind into an instrument in a live performance context. He shared context behind some of his projects like Lightning Guitar, Brainwave Controlled Music Show, and Interactive Music and Dance.

Rena Anakwe’s talk, “Building Worlds through Sound, Visuals and Scent,” described how all of the senses factor into her immersive performances. Emphasizing the healing power of music, she concluded the talks with a sound-scent bath that was a perfect finale as we transitioned into hacking and workshops.

Workshops

In the first workshop, Jay Alan Zimmerman and David Lu described techniques for visualizing music. 

Then, they delved into some of the technical approaches to music visualization that powered their work for Google’s “Seeing Music.”

Kyle Luntz led the second workshop, connecting live audio with environmental sensors.

Participants used open source software and hardware (Pure Data and Arduino).

Kyle is an artist and musician, as well as educator at Beam Center, a Brooklyn-based non-profit who generously lent extra Arduinos for the workshop.

Hacking

With all of the workshops there was still some time for hacking, pizza, and meeting new people.

We hit capacity at the beginning of the day, and our amazing volunteer organizers like Steph, Alan and Vinay helped us handle the overwhelming interest in the event without breaking the fire code.

Demos & Performances

At the end of the day, participants shared what they worked on, interspersed with special guest performances from Viola Yip, Richard Einhorn/Ruth Cunningham, Jay Alan Zimmerman and David Lu. Jay Alan Zimmerman’s performance incorporated sign language and included everyone in the audience. He then provided visuals for a Richard Einhorn composition w/ the performer Ruth Cunningham.

Throughout the performances, visuals projected and reflected throughout the physical space.

Viola Yip performed with Bulbble, a DIY instrument that incorporates a circuit of lightbulbs as an interface for the audio and visual interplay for a performance

A demo of “Tongues,” by Alex Suber, Nathan Miller, Armand Bernardi: an augmented sound experience that classifies the mood and sentiment of speech based on its timbre, and uses this to generate music.

Alex Wang, Dan Cho, and Adam Rahman worked on “Windown”: a sleep aid application intended to be incorporated into a nighttime routine.

Halley and CJ demoed the sound of tattooing an orange.

Concluding the performances, David Lu aka Condrummer, demonstrated his unique audio-visual compositions

We livestreamed the talks and demos/performances and you can view them on youtube. Unfortunately the video framerate is low, but the audio quality is high!

Photos by Inza Bamba, Brenden Hussey, Vinay Raghavan, Allen Riley and Jason Sigal.

Thank you!

Many thanks to all who participated in the event and to everyone involved in making it happen! Thank you to everyone at Weav Music for hosting us, transforming their office to accommodate the event, and putting such care and thought into the planning. Thank you to Spotify for supporting pizza and live captioning. Thanks Stan(ographer) for captioning. Thank you Shagari Guity for graphics. Thanks to all of our incredible guests (Jay, Kon, Johann, Yago, Rena, David, Kyle, and Viola) for sharing their work. And thank you to the many volunteers (Alan, Brenden, Holly, Inza, Jason, Jay, Marium, Shagari, Steph, Taylor and Vinay) who organized on behalf of Music Community Lab!

Please reach out to contact” at ” musiccommunitylab.org if you’d like to get involved with future events!

[conversationswithrocks]

Results of the @musichackathon last weekend: I ended up working intensely with the composers Elliot Cole and Dan Tepfer on this fractal rhythm idea I had. We ended up with some code (Elliot’s code is the final product but Dan gave us a run for it) and some music. Dan also at the same time was working on an automatic counterpoint generator, which he and Elliot were able to sing harmonies from at the end presentation. All in all, it was awesome. 

[paloobi]

Hackathons & Self-Confidence

Hello!

I’m writing at the end of week 4 of Grace Hopper Academy. I’ve been really enjoying my time at GHA. I’m learning an absolute ton of new things, and also, I’m having a really awesome time! I’ve been very happy to continue to affirm that fact that I do, in fact, love programming!

Just wanted to share that I participated in my first Hackathon last weekend at Spotify. I absolutely love the Monthly Music Hackathon, and can't wait to attend the next one! I'm in charge of helping our cohort at Hackathons, and I'm really excited to get the group out to some really amazing events.

In any case, I had a great time pairing with Gus Erickson, a student at Fullstack Academy, to create our first hackathon project!! The theme of the hackathon was lyrics & language, so we decided to create a random lyric generator.

It was absolutely amazing! I really enjoyed the opportunity to create an entirely new project, not from a workshop, but just from the creative process! It felt very similar to participating in 24-hour play festivals at my college. Only we got a product we could take home with us at the end! Great fun :)

Basically, we used the Moby Part-of-Speech project to seed a JSON file so we could have access to words based on parts of speech. We then created a couple of gramatically correct patterns that we could replicate with random words from our data. We also added the ability to choose how many lines are generated at a time, and to save the lyrics to a file. I like to think of it as a way to get inspiration to write cheesy, pretentious songs.

You can check out the project here - and here's the source code.

I'm very much looking forward to leading Grace Hopper's first cohort in some exciting hackathons in the next few months! If you know of any hackathons coming up in NYC that you'd like to recommend, please feel free to send me an email! I'd love to hear your suggestions.

[stagehuddle]

Really poured my heart into this one. Thought you might like to read it. Why You Should Care About Music Hack Atl. bit.ly/1APYVep

[stagehuddle]

Music Hack Atl is a unique camaraderie between music and technology. Create websites and apps in a weekend with your new best friends. 

[stagehuddle]

Music Hack Atl is a unique camaraderie between music and technology. Create websites and apps in a weekend with your new best friends. 

[stagehuddle]

Music Hack Atl is a unique camaraderie between music and technology. Create websites and apps in a weekend with your new best friends.