hacking

Music Hackday, being held July 11-12 at the Guardian Offices in London, is a hack day focusing on European music site.

According to organizers:

European music sites are revolutionising the music industry, not least with their eagerness to open up their data with APIs.

We will be running a Hack Day independent from, but working with the companies at the forefront of this movement. We hope you’ll be able to join us.

We will be sorting tickets out soon, to be on the list of people who would like to attend then drop your details into the register page.

Participating organizations include SoundCloud, Last.fm and Songkick.

via jzylkin:

This is the synaesthesia-sizer I invented for my girlfriend Kelsey.

We’ll be giving a class on DIY pencil synthesizers at The Hacktory in Philadelphia on June 27th, 2009. Please come! Admission is $10.

If Kelsey goes for this sort of thing, jzylkin’s found himself a keeper, don’t you think?

Last week, we asked if the Akai APC40, the new, relatively inexpensive MIDI controller for Ableton Live, was going to make the monome irrelevent.

It’s clear that the Akai APC40 is stealing some of the monome’s mojo, because the APC40 is cheap and offers a great array of controls. At $400, the APC40 is cheap enough to become the new hot platform for music hacking.

As a result, videos, like the one above, are starting to appear on YouTube. The video demonstrates Akai APC40 customization and adding additional functionality with Bome’s MIDI Translator Pro.

This is just scratching the surface, though. CDM’s Peter Kirn has put together a nice SuperGuide to hacking the APC40. It looks at monome emulation, manual MIDI mapping, MIDI lights and more.

This is a must-read for APC40 owners, or if you’re considering the purchase of an APC40.

If you’ve got other ideas or resources for APC40 hacking, leave a link in the comments!

In this video, Chris Randall demos Synthpond on his iPhone driving MKS-80 via OSC/Pd. Using Synthpond as a sequencer to drive other synths makes things a lot more interesting, because of the expanded sound creation options available as soft synths.

Here’s Randall’s explanation of his setup:

As the title says. Synthpond running on my iPhone is talking to Pd via OSC. I made a patch to turn the Synthpond OSC data in to MIDI notes. I’ve got Pd sending MIDI to Cubase via MIDI Yoke.

The MKS-80 is receiving note data from MIDI Yoke in Cubase. All effects are from an H8000FW except reverb, which is [redacted].

Regarding the specific Pd patch, I’ve got the Synthpond /freq to MIDI note, and /life to velocity. Now that I’ve got the proof-of-concept out of the way, I’ll probably route xPos and yPos to CC data to control panning and such, and perhaps wire the Synthpond affectors to fire something else. Once I have the patch more usable, I’ll put it up for download on Analog Industries.

The Blackbox Soundmachine is a experimentally Tangible User Interface, which contains 6 light sensors and Daka coded in Max/MSP.