something completely different
Wolfgang and I attended the MusicHackDay in Amsterdam last week. While we saw some cool things and had some great talks with people from Soundcloud, citysounds.fm, Steim, RJDJ etc., the whole day was a bit disappointing, because it was only one day (which is slightly below the threshold of time you need to produce visible/audible output) and because the network was extremely flakey (to say the least), so working with web APIs was kinda out of question.
We went there with a rather strange precondition: Wolfgang stumbled over the algorithms for so called Stream graphs, a special variant of stacked graphs which are not only very aesthetically pleasing (having a very strange, almost audible character), but also very easy to read.
So, our “well defined” hack day project was to visualize “something” with this newfound tool of ours. I then added some more complexity by trying to implement stream graphs on top of a javascript SVG library I always wanted to try: Raphaël.
It took us most of the way to Amsterdam (by train) to get a very crude version of a streamgraph to render. It took me most of the hackday itself to make that into a proper g.raphaeljs extension and it took us almost the full hackday to download SOME data to play with.
Finally, a week later, on last friday, I managed to turn this into a proper app. Today, I implemented labelling, and now I consider this “done enough” to brag about it. If your DNS is one of the faster kinds, you should be able to see it @ echonest.streamgraphing.org. (if not, try this heroku url)
What we do there is that we use the hotttness-api call to echonest to get a list of artists currently considered hawt, and then use the echonest feeds to get news items and blog posts on those artists. we aggregate them by weeks and display the numbers in a streamgraph.
BTW: Echonest is da bomb. What an amazing collection of APIs and services.
And who knows? Maybe this is enough to win some of the prices of the amsterdam hack day? :)
