In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn famously wrote about science undergoing “paradigm shifts”: that scientific change occurs in sudden upheavals. It’s normally not all that dramatic, even. What I’ve observed to happen is something like this: at a conference, someone will present evidence for an alternative explanation of data. Some people will listen, some […]
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Best of 2010: debcha’s tops in [Boston music] tech
December 23, 2010Cross-posted from Boston’s best local music blog, Boston Band Crush. Boston is a music town. And Boston is a tech town. So it’s hardly surprising that Boston and Camberville produce an enormous amount of interesting stuff at the intersection of music and technology. Here are five of my favorite examples from this year: 1. Mashup Breakdown […]
Wanted: a way to aggregate streaming tracks
December 3, 2010I’ve decided that I really want a mashup of exfm, Shuffler.fm and delicious, with a dash of smart playlisting thrown in. Here’s the problem: Every day I find cool streaming music in lots of different places. Soundcloud. YouTube. Tumblr. (that’s a piece of my Tumblr dashboard, above). But for most of it, I listen to it […]
Brian Whitman, “Music in the Time of Data”
November 23, 2010Brian Whitman, the co-founder and CTO of The Echo Nest, gave a great talk at Olin College in Needham, MA last week, as part of the Technology and Culture Seminar Series.* His talk was a combination of personal narrative, a recent history of computer-generated music, and a look into the future of the interaction of […]
Music hacks and research questions
October 16, 2010I’m spending part of this weekend at the Boston Music Hack Day in Cambridge, MA. Like lots of people, my ideas far outstrip my abilities and (especially!) the amount of time I have, so I thought I’d put some of them up here, in the hope that they may spark some ideas in other people. […]
Engineering and music at the Frontiers of Engineering
October 4, 2010A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate to be able to attend the National Academy of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering symposium on behalf of my day job. One of the sessions focused on Engineering and Music, organized by Daniel Ellis of Columbia University and Youngmoo Kim of Drexel University, and some of my notes […]
Thinking about playlists
September 5, 2010I love playlists. I live and die by them, and make new ones almost daily. My car doesn’t have an MP3 input and I have a daily commute, so a good chunk of my music listening is in the form of burned CDs—de facto sub-75-min playlists. And I realize it’s antediluvian, but I still trade […]
SXSWi 2011 panel proposals in music and tech
August 16, 2010Thinking about heading to South by Southwest Interactive next March? There’s a host of intriguing panel proposals in the music, technology and culture space. Below is a round-up of the zed equals zee faves. Click on the titles for more info and to vote. Love, Music & APIs (Dave Haynes, SoundCloud and Paul Lamere, The […]
The remix nation needs legislation
May 28, 2010If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard of something called “The Swinger.” It’s a piece of Python code that debuted at the San Francisco Music Hack Day a few weeks ago, which uses The Echo Nest‘s remix software to automagically stretch and shorten beats in a song to give it that […]
Mobile collaborative playlisting (a prototype)
March 19, 2010One of my colleagues at Olin College, Mark Chang, teaches a course on Mobile Applications Development. Instead of a midterm exam, he runs a design contest. We invited Paul Lamere of Echo Nest to campus to talk about their APIs, and Mark’s students had ten days to build an app for the Android that used […]
If music recommenders were people
November 30, 2009University of Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, they’re related) and his research team have created instruments to measure two aspects of personality: the systemization quotient, which measures how oriented you are towards systems (anything with predictable inputs and outputs) and the empathic quotient, which measures how oriented you are towards people. People who are autistic […]
Music Hack Day Boston: the art of noise
November 25, 2009I promised myself that I would actually make something at Music Hack Day Boston, not just hang out while other people made stuff. So I signed up for circuit bender Jimmie Rodgers‘s newbie workshop on making an Atari Punk Console, a simple synthesizer that Jimmie designed and has made available as a kit. It uses […]
Music Hack Day Boston, Nov 21
November 21, 200910 am: Saturday, November 21st: I am a nerd imposter. Paul Lamere just announced that the primary activity for this weekend is hacking, and that everything else is optional. As someone who spends way more time doing experimentation and analysis than coding and soldering, I’m suddenly realizing that I’m the wrong kind of nerd. I’m […]
SanFran MusicTech Summit roundup
May 21, 2009This year’s SanFran MusicTech Summit had a lot going on. Somewhere north of 600 people turned up, including tech/development people, marketers, and business development people, and I’d say about half of the crowd put up a hand when asked if they were a musician (I suspect there’s considerable overlap between that category and the others). […]
Music and tech news roundup
March 31, 2009First off, the zed equals zee happy hour was a rousing success, with lots of terrific conversation. It was fantastic to meet so many Boston musicians and bloggers face to face, including some of the people behind Boston Band Crush, The Limits of Science, Electric Laser People, and Paul Lamere of Music Machinery and his […]
Click track or unassisted drummer?
March 9, 2009A really neat exercise from the fantastic music-tech blog, Music Machinery. Using a set of software tools that allow you to manipulate audio, Paul Lamere analysed a number of songs to try to determine if the drummer used a click track or not. The basic idea was to average the tempo over the course of […]
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