Music Hack Day Boston

First off. I have to make this disclaimer. Echonest is bad ass. Last fm is bad ass. Noteflight is bad ass. Sound cloud is fairly bad ass. A lot of other companies represented were bad ass as well. They are solving interesting and difficult problems. After seeing some of the demos, however, I'm a bit uneasy.

Remixing, discovering, listening, sharing, etc. are all important. There is a great opportunity when you make something easy to do for others through an API. For one, it becomes very hard to say, for example, this interface sucks or they have too many (or few) features, I'm going to rebuild the entire system to compete with them and their shitty product. It gives you insulation against competition. Second, it gives you an awareness of where your main product could be expanded. Third, the world gets more ways to benefit from your hard work. Fourth, it's nice to have other businesses dependent on your success for their success. Lastly, it's just good karma.

The proliferation of Web API's has been great for entertainment. It's even great for some businesses. Some people are getting paid via google ads, and others are offering social media consultancy. I am not claiming that this is a house of cards or that these companies do not offer anything to the world.

When it comes to music though, I found it striking that there was so little offered in the way of creation. The emphasis seemed to be on consumption, or on making consumption easier for others. Remixing is not excepted in this. If it is automatic, it sounds like shit. Always. Yes, you can use the echonest API to find the key center of a section. Yes, you can use another tool to mix samples of other songs, and form a reasonable progression out of it. It is not complete. It sounds cheap. If anything, this is the genesis of something else, but it cannot stand alone.

It's made easy by today's tools. Only an idiot would consider it as anything more than a curiosity. In I don't know, 20? lines of code, you get some sound. Anyone else who makes the smallest bit of effort can do the same. That is an amazing accomplishment for Echonest. Not for you. Don't take the credit. It's insulting to everyone who has made an effort. You're not contributing anything of value, just consuming in a different way.

Please keep in mind that I'm not saying that the demos were bad. They used the technologies provided and pulled a lot together in a couple of days. It just felt a little redundant that most projects were focused on consumption. Given the wealth of legal and illegal solutions for end users looking to find/listen to/share/experience music, it was a little underwhelming to hear about more solutions to seemingly solved problems. After all, when a user has years of music, listening to 7 seconds of a song just to hear the beginning or the hook before moving on, it's hard to imagine that these solutions are good for an audience that already over-consumes and under-appreciates. Naturally, this isn't everyone, but it's a sizable demographic that is likely to only become more gluttonous when music is treated as data.

Two classic and difficult music tech problems were attempted for the demos. Automatic composition and automatic transcription. The end products were cool, but incomplete. The composition, which aimed to use Bach fugues as training data for some type of machine learning was abandoned because it was harder than expected. The transcription programs were cool for a start, but both were far from providing a transcription that resembled the audio source. In any case, I actually found these attempts more impressive than some of the easy win projects.

Also impressive was Jimmy Rodgers. His circuit bending workshop was great. He was very attentive and respectful of the hardware beginners, and going home with some toys that I screwed with really added an exclamation point to my time at musichackday.

On a side note, I considered a career as a video game composer when I was in college. I joined G.A.N.G. and participated in the community. From what I read, I gathered that the odds were against me. Programmers and producers got paid more. The talent pool was huge. It was hard to break into it. Composers also have to be effects engineers. Audio budgets were always shitty in games... ok. Maybe I could have dealt with all of that. But the most damning thing to my potential career was that licensing was taking over. In other words, game companies are also increasingly taking the easy way out. I actually didn't make it out of the first town in FFXII. The musical loop was too short and unimaginative. The idea of adaptive audio has been around for a long time. If Square-Enix has that little regard for music innovation, they don't care about my patronage.

Anyways, maybe I'm being a little too hard on the world. I guess maybe I expected a little more out of the demos. Maybe it's just the spirit of consumption that underpinned the conference getting to me. Still, I'm left wondering. Does anyone still want to do the hard stuff? Play instruments? No, not Rock Band instruments. Actual instruments. Does anyone want to write music, instead of mixing it?

After my Japanese test in early December, I'm going to make a little more effort with composition. And with Sibelius (the composition software I used in college) being kind of a big ticket item, I think that Noteflight and I are going to become really good friends.