#twitspace

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[echonest]

10 Nifty Apps from Music Hack Day Barcelona

What could possibly convince 60 otherwise clever folks to spend 24 hours in a windowless room in Barcelona, Spain, as the excellent Sónar music festival raged just outside -- in beautiful, 80-degree sunshine, no less?

Yup, you guessed it: Music Hack Day, which took place in Barcelona on Thursday and Friday to coincide with Sónar. This event, sponsored by The Echo Nest and others, strove to take advantage of the presence of so many electronic artists by mixing them with the usual hacker attendees. So as one might expect, more hacks than usual had to do with making music -- including the obligatory Microsoft Kinect hack, and a slightly more unusual appearance by a duck.

In total, participants created and presented 31 functional hacks. Ten used the Echo Nest APIs, and many of those took advantage of new capabilities we released especially for the event.

The Echo Nest's own Matthew Ogle, clearly nostalgic for the glory days of the web, used his newfound ability to extract artist names from any text to create the unholy Chrome extension TwitSpace, which returns the interwebs to the glory days of MySpace circa 2006 -- this time, as a Twitter sidekick.

Among a field of strong contenters, our favorite hack was awarded the coveted Echo Nest iPad 2 of Excellence™: Twitter Music Trends by Adam Lindsey, which does the decidedly futuristic work of harvesting artists trending in real time on Twitter and presents them in a nice, retro-computing interface.

Meanwhile, SoundLock picked up our honorable mention for its clever sonic update of the "captcha" concept; it asks users to hum or clap something to prove they aren't a computer, rather than copying a bunch of blurry letters. 

Approximately one out of every three hacks at Music Hack Day Barcelona used The Echo Nest's deep musical intelligence, which includes five billion datapoints about over 30 million songs:

Twitspace (Tim Bormans and Matthew Ogle): "Bring back that ol' MySpace magic to Twitter.com."

Notebook (Luca Chiarandini and Eduardo Graells): "Did you ever wonder how the world would have been different if social media always existed?"

Echonestified Music Search (Omid Aladini): "Search for the music that contains similar musical patterns. Search music by music."

ScoreSynth (Graham Coleman): "Render a score from loosely connected samples."

Twitter Music Trends (Adam Lindsay): "Watch twitter for the artists being tweeted about right now, and see current trends."

SoundLock (Tobias Schmidt): "Password protection by sound recognition."

DanceHell (Michiel Gardner): "Dancehell creates dancehall versions of any track you upload. Air horns, guns, lasers, backspins, and MCs will be mixed through the song."

Shoebox.FM (Guus Baggermans & Joris Zaalberg): "An audiovisual trip down memory lane."

EchoNestBrowser (Emerson Castaneda): "A simple Java web app that allows [users] to explore some of The Echo Nest API functions. Look for Artists, Songs and some filtering options."

SoundTrackIt (Mohamed Sordo): "Create the Soundtrack of a Movie based on the top words of the movie subtitles."

The Wiki has the full list of every MHD hack under the Catalonian sun.

And as usual, you can take a peak at this exciting event via official Music Hack Day photographer Thomas Bonte's Flickr set.

(Top photo via Flickr/Thomas Bonte)