Hack Day Recap: London Music Hack Day

For the fifth year in a row, the creators of Music Hack Day invited us all to Shoreditch Village Hall in London for the last hackathon of the year. With over 50 hacks on display during the demos, we’d like to present some of our favorites here. You can find the full list on Hacker League. Big thanks to Martyn Davies for making this happen!

Hipster Robot

A hipster robotic arm that stops you listening to any music it deems “too mainstream”, made by @aaronjrandall.

The hipster robot is controlled by a Raspberry Pi, and monitors the music playing from Spotify on your laptop. Play any artist currently in the top 100 artist “hot list” from The Echo Nest, such as Taylor Swift or Just Bieber, and the robot kicks into action, pressing the spacebar on your computer to stop the music playing.

More info at: aaronrandall.com/blog/hipster-robot/.

Didgidoo - An electronically augmented didgeridoo

Made by @AdamMacadamia. This miniature didgeridoo aims at augmenting the sounds made by the instrument by using your mouth ”where you can shape it for all kinds of resonating filtery joy”.

Notepad

@VivienBarousse from SongKick made a webcam based piano where you first draw your piano on a paper and then transfer it into a digital canvas.

MHD Bingo

A meta hack made by @theleadingzero giving everyone in the room the possibility to play bingo with a homage to everything that MHD has come to be. You got to tick one box per hack and the square contained content such as “Non-white dude presenting a hack”, “Boasting about list.js” and “cowbell”.

The winners got a smattering of Christmas-related swag.

LifeSong

Made by @BenNunney from Twilio, this machine of beauty was made in 1985 and was part of the hack LifeSong.

“LifeSong was written entirely on an Amstrad 1512 - a mid-80s PC with 512k RAM and a 4Mhz processor. It’s based in Pascal with a BASIC wrapper around it. LifeSong asks the user a series of questions about their life, mixes it all together, salts it, and uses it to create a song out of beep codes.”

This was the overall winning hack.

JackDAW

Richard Jackett put together “A basic digital audio workstation, built inside an Excel workbook”. Thanks again to Martyn for creating such an awesome event, we were proud to be there.

Happy Holidays hackers, we’ll see you in 2014.