Dave Haynes (VP Business Development for SoundCloud, founder of OpenMusicMedia) and Matthew Ogle (The Echo Nest music intelligence platform, former head of web product at Last.fm) presented information on how the love of music and application programming interfaces (APIs) are coming together.  Driven by their love of music (and sometimes driven by their quirkiness about the music they love), programmers are meeting up in organized forums to bring music and tech applications together.

APIs are the next logical step for the music – but this step is not necessarily being taken because of market-driven considerations.  Presenter Dave Haynes explained that this is on of the important contributing factors to the inventiveness and diversity of the APIs that are being developed:  That  no one is thinking “how can I make money off this?”   The lack of imperative to turn APIs into commercial applications has opened the door to an even wider range of hacker creativity – developers are tailoring the APIs they create to their own uses, whether for scraping and compiling data, for creating new types of API-based musical instruments, or for creating really useful things that are build “just for kicks.”

A list of hacks developed at NYC Music Hack Day 2011 shows that the possibilities are truly endless:     Whether finding out if your favorite band is “earth friendly” in the way it sets its tour schedule, developing “invisible instruments” (using an iPhone and a Wii controller), or locating differences in “city sounds” by geographic location, hackers are leading the charge in application development for music lovers.  Some examples are “Find You Some Vinyl” (an app that uses scraped data to help vinyl music lovers locate hard-to-find vinyl-format recordings for sale) and “The Swinger” (which will add a swing beat to any track without changing the instrumentation, singer, or composition of the song).  Presenter Matt Ogle even developed a “bragging rights”-type app to settle I-heard-them-before-you-did arguments between music hipsters who use the Scrobbyl app.  (Yes, folks, there’s something for everyone!)

Getting back to the previously-mentioned Music Hack Day:  it’s actually not just one day, over and done.  There are a series of Music Hack Days (24-hour hacking marathons where hackers come together in furious bursts of API development) in various major cities worldwide.  In a brief interview Matt provided information on how to get hooked up with the next Music Hack Day ( San Francisco, California, on May 15-16, 2011):

For more information, be sure to check out http://sf.musichackday.org/

You can also follow the presenters:

Dave Haynes at http://davehaynes.me/ and @haynes_dave

Matthew Ogle at http://lanyrd.com/people/flaneur/ and @flaneur