Hacking: Music to MIT Ears
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slice.mit.edu
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If there's a global event with "hack" in the title, it's a safe bet MIT is somehow involved.
Enter Music Hack Day @ MIT, a two-day hackathon held at the Stata Center earlier this month. More than 300 programmers and artists gathered to conceptualize and build next-generation music applications using catalogs and interfaces provided by major music companies.
Participants could use anything music-related, including software, hardware, and instruments. The MIT hackfest—which was free and open to the public—is part of the global series of Music Hack Days, which originated in London in 2009 and have been held in 14 countries.
As one might expect, Institute alums are well-represented among the full list of projects. A sample of alum-created hacks, which include a new take on karaoke and a lyric-creating algorithm, is below.
- LyriChef devises new lyrics based on a statistical analysis of your favorite artists. (Tom Baran SM '07, PhD '12 and Matthew Hirsch SM '09)
- Bigwing is a live-performance beat-slicing instrument. (Michael Dewberry '00)
- Tipper Gore uses music databases to automatically generate iTunes playlists, including screening lyrics for explicit content. (Robert Dredge '93)
- BeatBrush is music/art mashup that links music with its equivalent piece of artwork. [View a demo.] (Shambhavi Kadam '06, MBA '12)
- InstantKaraoke is a multi-player game that makes karaoke available for any song. (Geza Kovacs '12 and Cathy Wu '12)
- Brain Music uses cortical learning algorithms to teach music structure and generate new music. (Stanislav Nikolov '11, MNG '12)
- top40chan gleans musician names from message board discussions and creates a page of music videos for the artists mentioned most often. (Noah Vawter SM '06, PhD '11)
- Bundio is a Dropbox locker that enables fans to subscribe to their favorite artists and have new content delivered to them as it becomes available. (Media Lab fellow Yakov Vorobyev)
