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Monthly Music Hackathon NYC is a monthly all-day event for musicians and engineers to create new music-related projects from scratch, develop them throughout ~6 hours, then perform or present them in a concert in the evening.
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Everyone is welcome. Expect a crazy frenzy of experimentation.
Anyone who wants to make something related to music.
Musicians with little experience with hands on technology who want to meet and collaborate with techies, and have the experience of working through new ideas quickly and practicing finishing projects.
Musicians who use technology to make their art.
Programmers, engineers, and scientists with an interest in any aspect of music.
Wiktionary gives one definition of hack as “To work with something on an intimately technical level.” An appropriate hack at this event would work on an intimately technical level with any subject surrounding music, such as making sound, making instruments, making compositions, analysis of a piece of music, analysis of a music collection, analysis of music listening data, making music presentation platforms, making music sharing apps, making music sales apps, etc, etc, etc…
Anything that makes a mess. Sorry, our space is not equipped for luthiering. :)
While the presentation of your project can and should make sounds, while you’re creating it you will be surrounded by others trying to work on their own project, so please keep the noise making quiet and/or intermittent.
No, there are no expectations about participants’ skills or goals at Monthly Music Hackathon NYC. It is essentially a totally free-form event: Work on your own, come with a group, or meet people when you arrive. Come with an idea you have in advance, come up with something the day-of, or work with people you meet to come up with an idea. The end result could be art, research results, a musical instrument, a commercial product, tools for artists or developers, or anything else related to music in whatever way you imagine.
It’s up to you whether you work on your own project, come with collaborators to work with, find collaborators beforehand via Twitter or the relevant Facebook event page, or hope to meet collaborators in person at the hackathon.
We will, however, all collaborate at the end of the day on crafting the flow of the concert/presentations.
Nope, but it’ll be good for you if you do! Even if your project didn’t work out, folks will want to hear about your idea and what went wrong.
You can perform music or tell people about what you made or do something else entirely.
Electricity. A small PA system. A projector. A stage-ish area about 10x10 feet.
Nope.
The person or people who created the work retain ownership of the work.
Usually one Saturday of every month from around Noon till ~9 PM. Sometimes we have talks or other events the night before, and sometimes we bleed into Sunday. Stay tuned to the mailing list for details, or check our blog.
It’s in a different place in New York City each month. Stay tuned to the mailing list for announcements.
Anyone who’s attended any of the awesome Music Hackdays knows they are super fun events. But they are infrequent. There have been other music-focused hackathons in New York since then, but they tend to be geared toward the music industry, advertising, and recruiting. There’s nothing inherently wrong with those things, but it seems like there is a desire in the NYC music tech community to have these events more often, focus more on creativity, and make artists feel welcome.
For me personally, I have a ton of music tech projects on the back burner that I don’t get a chance to work on. Blocking off an entire day once a month to focus on these projects will encourage habits of creativity and productivity.
The ideas from the tech startup world of rapid prototyping, iteration, and completion can be extremely helpful for artists. This will be a venue dedicated to practicing those techniques.
We’re trying to be as free from sponsorships as possible, in order for the nature of the event to be guided as much as possible by its participants.
Yes, we need money to pay for food, invited speakers and performers, venues, and audio and electronics equipment. However, we don’t have API talks and we keep the swag to a minimum.
Yes! Please let us know if you want to help set up, clean up, carry food in or out, stand at the door to guide people in, run the mixing board, etc.
The organizers of Monthly Music Hackathon NYC are an eclectic mix of musicians, engineers, artists, scientists, and weirdos.
Yes! If you want to help decide what the future of Monthly Music Hackathon NYC will be, and want to work to make it happen, please get in touch!
For more info, email us at {{site.email}} or contact us on Twitter @{{site.twitter_username}}.