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#MusicBricks

TAKING MUSIC TECH IDEAS TO MARKET

#MusicBricks welcomes SoundCloud

#MusicBricks is proud to announce SoundCloud as its official cloud platform:
“#MusicBricks is exactly the sort of open and collaborative music creation SoundCloud is about. It opens up new options for makers and musicians to be creative and we’re excited to support it and see what amazing creations are born.”
Matt Fenby Taylor, VP Creator Product, SoundCloud

Ben Heck joins #MusicBricks teams

The legendary Ben Heck joined #MusicBricks teams at the #MTFBerlin element14 Hack Camp. Teams were interviewed for a special episode of the Ben Heck Show.

#MusicBricks hits 5.5 million impacts!

The hashtag #MusicBricks has registered 5,5 million impacts on Twitter one year after the toolkit release.

A #MusicBricks patent is filed

The newly formed Swedish company Sojaner AB has patented technologies deveolped with #MusicBricks. The Swedish Patent Application No. 1650637-0 filed - “Headphone system” is under embargo until November 2017.

#MusicBricks project receives Ars Electronica Jury Nomination

#FindingSomethingBondingSound receives the Ars Electronica STARTS Prize Jury Nomination for achievements at the crossover between science and art.

#MusicBricks accessibility success is featured in national media

#HiNote has featured on the BBC and in the Guardian newspaper in the UK, on Radio Eins in Germany and on Portuguese National Television.

#MusicBricks incubatee listed in Forbes' 30 under 30

Airstrument’s Matan Berkowitz has been listed in Forbes’ 30 under 30 top entrepreneurs in Israel.

#MusicBricks toolkit increases to 15!

The number of tools in the #MusicBricks toolkit has increased from the 8 originally planned to 15. Three tools have been added to the toolkit by new #MusicBricks industry partners.

R-IoT lined up for production

The #MusicBricks Tangible User Interface - the Ircam-developed R-IoT - has been batch tested for commercial production. Talks are being conducted between #MusicBricks and major global distributers for large scale deployment.

11 new products hit the market

11 #MusicBricks products have been launched after the first year. These include applications for gaming, heavy machinery, science and sports.

 

Director of #MusicBricks awarded Innovation Luminary

Michela Magas has been awarded Innovation Luminary 2016 for Creative Innovation at the Open Innovation 2.0 in Amsterdam.

 

 

“Really happy to be joining the awesome #MusicBricks project. The whole concept of making tools freely available, providing space for makers and hackers and then supporting what’s made with them is just brilliant. This is a new cooperative Win strategy. Looking forward to see what comes out of our #MusicBricks offerings. Onwards!”

Matt Black, Coldcut / Ninja Tune

 

#MTFLabs with Viktoria Modesta by @PeterKolskiArt
 

 

 

 

“I have managed to code the machine learning to recognise 3 different gestures with accuracy close to 100% and I’m so excited about it. I used your suggestions… and now, the machine recognizes the static data up to 100% accurate… It is so cool. I am loving these Machine Learning algorithms. Thank you for your help…”

Rojan Gharibpour, Incubatee

 

 

What is #MusicBricks?

#MusicBricks is a set of interoperable tools designed for hackers and creative developers. It gives creators and digital content makers easy access to the core building blocks of music. Built upon high-level research coming out of Europe’s finest institutions, the technologies are bundled and packaged into simple-to-deploy APIs, GUIs and TUIs that enable creative and technical minds to create new music projects, products and performances that might otherwise have been unimaginable.

 

#MusicBricks toolkit

#GestureSensors_100px
Gesture Sensors for Music Performance
The R-IoT sensor module embeds a 9 axis sensor with 3 accelerometers, 3 gyroscopes and 3 magnetometers, all 16 bit. It allows for getting 3D acceleration, 3-axis angular velocity and absolute orientation at a framerate of 200 Hz over WiFi. The core of the board is a Texas Instrument WiFi module with a 32 bit Cortex ARM processor that execute the program and deals with the Ethernet / WAN stack. It is compatible with TI’s Code Composer and with Energia, a port of the Arduino environment for TI processors. The sensor module is completed with a series of analysis MaxMSP modules that facilitates its use, based on the MuBu & Co Max library. This collection of analysis tools allows for: filtering and analyzing, computing scalar intensity from accelerometer or gyroscope, kick detection, Mdetection motion patterns such as “freefall”, spinning, shaking, slow motion. Further motion recognition tools are available in the MuBu & Co library.
#MelodyExtraction_100px
Melody Extraction
This module includes a number of pitch tracking and melody transcription algorithms implemented in the Essentia library. Applications include visualization of predominant melody, pitch tracking, tuning rating, source separation.
#OnsetDescription_100px
Real-time Onset description
This module allows to detect onsets in real-time and provide a number of audio descriptors. It is part of essentiaRT~, a real-time subset of Essentia (MTG’s open-source C++ library for audio analysis and audio-based music information retrieval) implemented as an external for Pd and Max/MSP. As such, the current version does not yet include all of Essentia’s algorithms, but a number of features to slice and provide on-the-fly descriptors for classification of audio in real-time. A number of extractors analyse instantaneous features like the onset strength, the spectral centroid and the MFCC’s over a fixed-size window of 2048 points, after an onset is reported. Furthermore, essentiaRT~ is able to perform estimations on larger time-frames of user-defined lengths, and to report finer descriptions in terms of noisiness, f0, temporal centroid and loudness.
#Sonarflow_100px
Sonarflow
A slick UI for browsing music by zooming into a colourful world of bubbles which represent genres, artists or moods which allows to discover new music online from various sources. It is available for iOS and Android, with APIs connecting to 7digital, last.fm, Youtube, Spotify, etc. Demo app in Google Play Store. See sonarflow.com and the source code on github.com/spectralmind.
#Synaesthesia_100px
Synaesthesia
A color detection tool triggering and controlling audio. Based on OpenCV it includes a colour detection engine and object tracking algorithm to control music and sound using plain colours or coloured objects. Using the camera it can trigger musical events. It includes an example app with a dedicated GUI. It is available for OSX and iOS. Find it on github: https://github.com/stromatolite/Synaesthesia
 

#Freesound_100px
Freesound API
Freesound (www.freesound.org) is a state-of-the-art online collaborative audio database that contains over 200K Creative Commons licensed sound samples. All these sounds are annotated with user-provided free-form tags and textual descriptions that enable text-based retrieval. Content-based audio features are also extracted from sound samples to provide sound similarity search.  Users can browse, search, and retrieve information about the sounds, can find similar sounds to a given target (based on content analysis) and retrieve automatically extracted features from audio files; as well as perform advanced queries combining content analysis features and other metadata (tags, etc…).  The Freesound API will provide access to a RESTful API with API Clients in Python, Javascript, Objective-C.

#RhythmTimbre_100px
Rhythm and Timbre Analysis
This is a library that processes audio data as input and analyzes the spectral rhythmic and timbral information in the audio to describe its acoustic content. It captures rhythmic and timbral features which can be stored or directly processed to compute acoustic similarity between two audio segments, find similar sounding songs (or song segments), create playlists of music of a certain style, detect the genre of a song, make music recommendations and much more. Depending on the needs, a range of audio features is available: Rhythm Patterns, Rhythm Histograms (i.e. a rough BPM peak histogram), Spectrum Descriptors and more. The library is available for Python, Matlab and Java.
#Transcriber_100px
MusicBricksTranscriber
(Melody & Bass Transcription + Beat & Key & Tempo Estimation)
The MusicBricksTranscriber provided by Fraunhofer IDMT is an executable that allows to transcribe the main melody and bass line of a given audio file. Also, the beat times, the key, and the average tempo are estimated. The results can be provided as MIDI, MusicXML, or plain XML files. In addition, a Python wrapper is included to further process the analysis results.
#POF_100px
POF
POF = Pd + OpenFrameworks : openFrameworks externals for Pure Data, providing openGL mutlithreaded rendering and advanced multitouch events management. A recent addition to #MusicBricks by Antoine Rousseau, in collaboration with Matt Black of Ninja Tune, it makes making PD music apps much easier including cross platform. It also feeds the Mobile Orchestra through SyncJams. Find it on Github.
#Musimap_100px
Musimap
Musimap’s algorithm applies fifty-five weighted variables to each music unit (e.g tracks, genres, labels) so as to model the world’s discography as a multi-layered system of cross-matched influences based on a musicological, lexicological and socio-psychological approach. The granular and proprietary database includes over 3B data points, 2B relations, and soon counting 50M songs. Its neural music network is the result of a unique combination of in-depth human curation and the latest AI technologies to engineer a multi-layered system.
 
#PitchDetection_100px
Real-time Pitch Detection
The real-time pitch detection allows to estimate the predominant melody notes (monophonic) or multiple notes (polyphonic) from a consecutive audio sample blocks. This allows to transcribe the currently played / sung note pitches from a recorded instrument / vocal performance. The monophonic version also estimates the exact fundamental frequency values. Typical applications are music games and music learning applications. Fraunhofer IDMT provides a C++ library as well as sample projects that show how to include the functionality.
#SearchBySound_100px
Search by Sound Music Similarity
The Search by Sound online system is based on the Rhythm and Timbre Analysis (see above) and provides a system which can be used via a REST Web API (called SMINT API) to upload, find and match acoustically similar songs in terms of rhythm and timbre – without the need to install any prerequisite or run the analysis on your own. It can be used with your own custom music dataset or the readily available content from freemusicarchive.org that was already pre-analyzed by rhythm and timbre, to find music matching a particular rhythm or timbre from that archive.
#MelodyExtraction_100px
Goatify
The Goatify tool provided by Fraunhofer IDMT is an executable that automatically replaces the main melody in a song with a given sample. Therefore the main melody is extracted and removed from the song. Then the sample is placed and pitched according to the melody notes in the song. For proper pitching of the sample, the pitch of the sample itself is extracted beforehand. The tool is delivered with free sound samples (goat, etc.) from www.freesound.org for direct use.
#SyncJams_100px
SyncJams
A recent addition to #MusicBricks, SyncJams is an open source standard to allow wireless inter music app sync and communication of key/scale between players in a ‘mobile orchestra’, authored by Chris McCormick in collaboration with Matt Black of Ninja Tune. Also defined as: “Zero-configuration network-synchronised metronome and state dictionary for music application”. Currently Pure Data and Python are supported. Find it on Github.
#RhythmTimbre_100px
Real-time Pitch-Shifting and Time-Stretching
The real-time pitch shifting library allows users to change the pitch of audio material while keeping the tempo. It allows enabled changing the tempo without changing its pitch. Typical applications are music games and music learning applications as well real time performances. Fraunhofer IDMT provides a C++ library as well as sample projects that show how to include the functionality.
 
Hands Free Sound Machine
A demo created as a collaboration between IRCAM and UPF to demonstrate synergies between their #MusicBricks tools. Watch the video

 

 

 

“#MusicBricks implicitly initiates a large network of people across many disciplines, with backgrounds as researchers, creators, artists, entrepreneurs, etc. This network provokes exchange of ideas far beyond the traditionally technology centred aspects that a technical university usually focuses on and therefore opens up inter-disciplinary research aspects that were not considered before.”

Thomas Lidy, TU Wien

 

 

Routes to market

“In some cases it’s “just” entertainment, in some cases this revolutionises how music is performed, in others it produces a new world-wide business”… #MusicBricks are designed to be the building blocks of future entertainment, performance and products. By putting top academic research and industry technologies in the hands of creative developers, and with the support of commercial partners and investors, #MusicBricks has supported 11 ideas with great potential to find routes to market.

 

#MusicBricks blog

#MusicBricks incubated team gets European funding

#MusicBricks incubated team gets European funding

I expect you know someone who has some programming skills. Perhaps someone with a bit of experience with EEG brain-computer interfaces. I imagine that person would probably enjoy going to live for a while in Portugal and enjoy some neurotechnology work in the beautiful, sunny city of Porto with some brilliant members of the Music Tech Fest family.

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SoundCloud teams up with #MusicBricks

SoundCloud teams up with #MusicBricks

#MusicBricks is exactly the sort of open and collaborative music creation SoundCloud is about. It opens up new options for makers and musicians to be creative and we’re excited to support it and see what amazing creations are born.

read more
#MTFBerlin: Announcing…

#MTFBerlin: Announcing…

Ben Heck, host of popular YouTube channel The Ben Heck Show joins us with his crew at #MTFBerlin to hack, invent, share a bit of maker knowledge and film a special episode of the show surrounded by our 50 hackers in the element14 Hack Camp.

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#MTFBerlin: Announcing…

#MTFBerlin: Announcing…

Mercury Prize nominee ESKA will not only appear on the main stage at #MTFBerlin… her plan is to form collaborations, invent new types of musical instruments and experiment in the giant creative laboratory that is Music Tech Fest.

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Meet Terry – our new Producer

Meet Terry – our new Producer

We’re incredibly proud and phenomenally lucky to be able to officially welcome Terry to the MusicTechFest family. She’s not just a new member of the team – she represents bold new ambitions, exciting new directions and an expanding network of artists and music technology to bring into the MTF community.

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#MTFBerlin at Funkhaus: 27-29 May 2016

#MTFBerlin at Funkhaus: 27-29 May 2016

Berlin is Europe’s capital of music tech – and MusicTechFest will once again bring the entire music technology ecosystem together under one roof: artists and scientists; academia and industry; makers, inventors, performers, composers and visionaries.

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The #MusicBricks toolkit so far has completely exceeded our expectations…

The #MusicBricks toolkit so far has completely exceeded our expectations…

By now, you’ll have heard about the #MusicBricks toolkit that puts groundbreaking music technology in the hands of musicians, hackers and creative developers, and supports the most promising ideas to commercial prototype. We’re going to be showcasing the successes from that project at our next big event: #MTFBerlin in May 2016.

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#MusicBricks is a collaboration between Stromatolite, Sigma-Orionis, Ircam-Centre Pompidou, Music Technology Group, Vienna University of Technology, and Fraunhofer IDMT

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European_Union

#MusicBricks has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 644871