HAMR Hackathon

About

The HAMR Hackathon took place October 16–17, virtually, across the globe.

HAMR (Hacking Audio and Music Research) is a series of hackathons that have often been scheduled as satellite events to ISMIR and NEMISIG. Participants were invited to propose and pursue any project that would fall under the ISMIR CfP, including but not limited to:

  • Music informatics
  • Audio, speech and music signal processing
  • Machine listening
  • Computer music
  • Computational auditory perception/cognition

Projects

Nine participating groups presented explainer videos and links to code, and a vote was held among participants in the categories of best code, documentation, and overall hack/research direction. They all did fantastic work!

1. Analysis of Chord Progression Networks – awarded Best Documentation!

Research crossing the fields of network science and MIR & musicology is relatively scarce. By representing specific entities (i.e. chords, notes, keys…) and relationships between them with the help of networks we can utilize the plethora of research methods that have been developed in that field.

2. Change The Way You Listen

Change The Way You Listen helps you create playlists based on your top listened artists in the last month using certain tracks properties such as danceability, energy, tempo and so on. It also shows you your own personal listening analysis based on the top artists that you had listened in the past 6 months.

3. Jam In Tune

Ever tried to play along to a song, and it turned out that you were in tune but the song was between keys? JamInTune is a Python package you can use to automatically tune that song!

4. Mad Mashup Generator

The mashup consists of an original and a cover version of your favourite song. Their chorus segments are played in alternating way bar-by-bar based on the music bars.

5. Meowify – awarded Best Hack / Research Direction!

Turn vocals from any youtube song to meows!

6. MixViz (Dj Mix Vizualization)

This is a tool to visualize the evolution of musical features throughout a DJ mix.

7. Randomly Generated GuitarPro Song – awarded Best Code!

8. SinFork

Desktop program for playing around with audio.

9. A Tool for Predicting Music Success

Using songs’ acoustic features, a machine learning model for predicting if a song will be at Spotify’s Top 50 even before its release is presented. Also, a tool is presented to use it based on Python.

Details

The information in this section was used to advertise the event. It has been updated slightly. We leave it here since it may be of interest to those planning future editions of HAMR and other virtual events!

What’s a Hackathon?

Hackathons are events where people gather to collaborate intensively on programming or design projects. A hackathon is a great chance to:

  • jump-start a new project;
  • get to know a new collaborator;
  • work on something silly or daring;
  • learn something!

The goal of HAMR\@vISMIR 2020 is to provide a (virtual) space for people from various institutions, backgrounds, and experience levels to test out novel ideas as opposed to finishing a polished project and paper.

When: HAMR 2020 will be right after ISMIR

In previous years, HAMR has taken place the weekend before ISMIR as a kind of warm-up. But after ISMIR, aren’t we all just overflowing with new ideas, exhausted from the week but longing to try something bold and new?

This year, HAMR will happen after ISMIR, making it an excellent chance to dive into a newly published dataset, test out a newly launched service, or work through a Jupyter notebook tutorial.

How: HAMR 2020 will be asynchronous (sort-of)

As a virtual, global event, HAMR has to accommodate an audience stretching from Auckland (GMT+12) to Alaska (GMT-8). This makes it tricky to co-ordinate kick-off (where projects are pitched to the audience) and closing (where groups present their work, and the audience votes on what they liked).

The hackathon happened in 3 sort-of asynchronous phases:

  1. Brainstorming / group forming: there were 2 pitch meetings, scheduled 1 hour and 13 hours before the kickoff.
  2. Hacking: the hacking period was 48 hours, with a kick-off on Friday, 10:00am UTC+1. (Note: the idea was NOT to hack for 48 hours straight — we suggested spending about 7 hours each day on your project, and using the rest of your weekend to eat well and get some rest!)
  3. Demos and voting: explainer videos and any other time-stampable links were due at the deadline (Sunday, 10:00am UTC+1), and made available to all shortly after. Voting was open for 12 hours after the demos were published.

This satisfied our aim to give participants:

  • real opportunities to meet others who plan to hack (hence the synchronous brainstorms);
  • time to hack at their own pace over 2 days;
  • reasonable daylight hours to look at the other hacks and vote.

Prizes

Participants will be encouraged to vote in the following categories:

  • Best Code → awarded to CJ Carr’s Randomly Generated GuitarPro Song!
  • Best Documentation → awarded to Lidija Jovanovska and Bojan Evkoski’s Analysis of Chord Progression Networks!
  • Best Hack/Research Direction → awarded to Thomas Melistas’s Meowify!

The awards come with bragging rights, and absolutely nothing else.

Non-2020 mailing list/contact

If you are interested in discussing HAMR generally (i.e., outside of the 2020 event), please join the hamr-discuss Google group.