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Hacking music radio   
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May 19, 2013 – 11:43 am

Logo orangeI decided to stay on at Music Tech Fest after my presentation yesterday, and ended up joining in with the hack challenges. There were plenty that I had nothing to contribute to, as I can’t write code or programme in any way – but one of the hack challenges caught my attention: “reinvent music radio”.

In fact, the brief was actually posed as follows:

Radio is crucial to the music industry. It promotes music to the masses and largely determines the taste of the public. The problem is that the channel to make and promote music is controlled by a few large stations. Can you develop an alternative to radio that allows independent labels to promote their music to the public?

I asked if anyone in the room was keen to work on this, and had no response. Most people wanted to invent new musical instruments, design a “3D playlist”, create a software oscillator, build a hardware drum trigger, hack the robot bartender – that sort of thing. Sexier projects where you get to make things, in other words.

However, once I finally decided to tackle the radio problem myself, I was quickly joined by a designer by the name of Jedediah.

Between us, by about 2am, we had come up with the core concepts for RADIATR: a mobile platform that aims to solve some of the problems discussed in the hack challenge above. Here’s the document I wrote, with some of Jed’s mockups in the mix.

ЯADIATR by adubber

Later today, I’m giving a presentation that outlines some of the key ideas. It’s not perfect, of course – it was created in less than 12 hours in an all-night brainstorming and development session fuelled by junk food and Red Bull (perfect hacker sustenance, apparently…), but I think there are some interesting concepts in here.

Here are the slides from this evening’s presentation. There are prizes at stake.

Interested to hear your thoughts. Whether we end up doing something with this remains to be seen – but I think we could stand to kick it around a bit more before we abandon it. I may be utterly sleep deprived, but I feel like there’s potentially something worthwhile in here somewhere…

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All this and a robot that makes cocktails   
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May 18, 2013 – 3:55 pm

Screen Shot 2013 05 18 at 16 49 03

I’m in London for Music Tech Fest this weekend. It’s exactly what it sounds like – a bunch of people coming together to talk about (and mess around with) music and technology. The talks are all being streamed live online (and most likely archived) at that link, if you’re interested.

I’m here with Jake, and it’s the first time we’ve done the father and son music industry conference attendance thing. It’s kind of fun – especially since he’s way more involved than I am.

Screen Shot 2013 05 18 at 16 32 14For his part, he’s engaged in the music hack event, in which there are a number of different challenges by different companies and interesting individuals to invent new things or solve certain sorts of problems.

It’s very coder-heavy (unsurprisingly for a hack event) – but there are also projects that are about inventing new sounds or simply reworking and remixing existing tracks. Jake’s currently working on a remix of a band called Everything Everything – and it’s sounding really great.

I gave a talk about my work – particularly with respect to the Brazilian independent music industry and the ‘music as a tool for social change’ projects I get involved with and study. That seemed to go well.

It’s an interesting and diverse crowd – everything from tech startups to musicians, entrepreneurs to social activists.

I always get a good response when I talk about the Fora do Eixo stuff – which bodes well, because I think that’s going to be a central strand of my work for the next few years.

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I’ve become interested in one of the hack projects – which is to completely reinvent radio. That’s the challenge. I’m hoping that one table of developers will want to get to work on that idea, because I have some thoughts about how that might work. I have just spent the last decade thinking about that problem, so it would be nice to have a play alongside somebody who knows how to build things out of internet.

But apart from the formal discussions and active projects, it is just a really lovely and creative space to be hanging out. I’ve had some great meetings with some brilliant and interesting people – and I think I may have a new funded research project in the pipeline as a result of one of those meetings.

There are some people here who are looking at the intersection between music publishing, sync licensing and digital technologies, and they’re going to be developing some really interesting software in that space, and they’ve asked me to come on board as an academic partner.

That sounds to me like a very good thing to be involved in – if for no other reason than it raises some fascinating problems which will dovetail very nicely with some of my other work.

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The festival is on all weekend, and I’m staying on through. It’s a great place to be.

I’m particularly looking forward to 6pm tonight, when Robert from Music Brainz is firing up the Bartendro 7 (pictured above). I’ve never had drinks poured for me by a cocktail-making robot before.

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The paperless dream   
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May 16, 2013 – 2:29 pm

Ft evernote

I’ve been using Evernote, on and off, for over three years now. And while it seems like a terribly clever thing, it just wasn’t that useful in my life. I take lots of notes, and I write a lot of things, but I have a number of different systems for sorting and filing those and it just didn’t make sense to add another one.

After all, which bit of my system would Evernote fit into or replace?

Turns out the answer was ALL OF IT.

I’ve been reading a few things about Evernote over the past few days, and I thought I’d try and make the most of what is actually a very simple and powerful tool.

The best thing is that Evernote will pretty much take whatever you throw at it – from voice memos to photos, PDFs to single lines of text. I’ve even been forwarding certain project-related information emails there, so that I can find them later. I trust Evernote’s search far more than I do Mail app’s.

You can tag, file and sort everything later, and it’s all incredibly searchable (and therefore findable). For someone who does a lot of writing, being able to locate all of the information you’ve ever bookmarked or saved on a particular subject (and likewise being able to clip it from your browser) is utterly invaluable.

I’ve created Notebooks for all of my different projects and have started organising on that basis. It’s a great way to have all of my research, all of my important documents – all of the papers I need for everything all in one cross-platform, OCR-scanning tool.

My ambition for the next month or so is to slowly go through all of the papers that I keep for one reason or another and scan as many of them as seems reasonable into Evernote and then throw them away. Some documents, of course, need to be kept for various reasons – but not nearly as many as I have in the house or at work.

So – the trick is not to dabble in Evernote – but to use it for EVERYTHING.

This Lifehacker article is worth a read if you’re inclined to give it a go.

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The lazy guide to fitness   
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May 15, 2013 – 9:18 am

It might surprise you to find me blogging about exercise. But it is something I’ve been paying a bit more attention to recently, and I found this to be quite interesting – so I share it with you in case it’s interesting to you too.

I’m quite lazy, and so I look for shortcuts and efficiencies.

Don’t get me wrong – I like to do a lot, and I like to do that stuff as well as I possibly can – but I also like to do it with the least amount of effort and time spent. That way, I can do lots of other stuff too. Or just hang out. That’s fun too.

I’ve been trying to get a little healthier and fitter recently, but exercise requires time and effort – things I like to minimise. Also, gyms can be expensive, and I travel a lot – so really, what I need is a workout that takes very little time, uses no gym equipment at all, and does everything I need it to – i.e. keep me alive, well and feeling good – with energy to spare for other, more enjoyable stuff.

Lifehacker, the New York Times and the Health and Fitness Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine to the rescue.

K bigpic

This interval routine takes around 8 minutes, and “science” says it works. Essentially, you spend 30 seconds on each of the above exercises in this order, with 10 seconds rest in between each.

Now, I’m already doing the 10,000+ steps a day walking thing, as well as having at least one fresh fruit & vegetable juice per day whenever possible (and not the full-on, slightly scary ‘juice fast‘ that people seem so keen on) – but I thought I’d give this a try as well for 30 days just to see how I get on.

So far so good. It’s not easy – in fact, it’s pretty full-on – but it’s over quickly.

However – looking at the chart and setting timers is a pain. It’s distracting and hard to manage while you’re actually trying to do the exercises or move from one to the next. So I came up with a neat solution.

With Jake‘s help, I recorded myself introducing the exercises (“Next: push ups…”), indicating the halfway mark (“15 seconds…”) and counting down (“10… 5,4,3,2,1… and stop.”). That way, I can just listen to my iPod and do the exercises without having to continually look at the charts and a stopwatch.

Jake added a house track, which times in nicely so that (at 120bpm) the countdowns are in time with the beats. Works very well.

If you’d find it helpful, let me know if you’d like a copy of the mp3 and I’ll send it to you – with or without the music. Whatever works for you. Not everyone likes house music. I find it keeps me going and the repetitive beats take my mind off the unpleasantness of the task.

I can’t recommend the programme unreservedly, as I am no health scientist, and this is only day 2. But it’s worth a try. And it does seem to have been well researched by people who know far more about this stuff than I do.

Plus, I’ve had time to write a blog post about it rather than trudging back from the gym in the rain.

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