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.