Canoris Beta

Last weekend, the 2nd and 3rd of Octobre, the Music Technology Group and BMAT organized the first Barcelona Music Hack Day after many other successful hack days around the world. The hack day being the perfect opportunity to launch Canoris and get some traction we worked hard the last couple of weeks getting our API ready for public use.

For if you're not familiar with the concept of a hack day, it's a weekend that revolves around companies presenting their APIs and hackers using them to in 24 hours build cool, useful, flashy, jaw dropping applications. API presentations start Saturday morning, hacking starts that day in the afternoon, and 24 hours later each hacker has 5 minutes to present his hack. A room full of hackers working around the clock looks something like this.

The BCN hack day added a little twist by not only organizing a hacking session, but some good workshops and concerts as well. About 150 hackers showed up, and quite a lot more people who came to attend the workshops or concerts.

Entering freshly into the world of music APIs and hack days, Canoris had to try and entice people to do some good hacks. What better than an iPad loaded with the brand new Reactable for iPad application released that day? Well, not counting the two tickets to the Boston event given away by SoundCloud. With 37 hacks in total, we were thrilled to see eight of them use the Canoris API. Although not a prize winner, The VoKaRoid hack by Oscar Mayor deserves to be mentioned; a complete web based sequencer for voice synthesis, even with support for karaoke files. The InstaExplorer for Freesound by Javi Agenjo was pretty slick as well. If this first hack with the new Freesound API is indicative of what we can expect in the future..

It was absolutely clear though that the Canoris prize had to go to Gerard Roma for his hack CantaMañanas (the MorningSinger). Upon entering a RSS feed link CantaMañanas sings it for you, accompanied by a break beat and chords that it finds from the Freesound API. Not only did it use the singing synthesis capabilities of Canoris, but also the similarity search and the analysis data for matching the beats and chords.

The hacks haven't been published yet, but we're working hard on helping the hackers getting them up and running. We'll let you know once they're up!

Photos by Thomas Bonte