Music Hack Day: jazz analysis app beats out 24 projects in Philly’s first music hackathon

An iPad app that teases out the different lines of a jazz piece won Philadelphia’s first Music Hack Day last month.

Dubbed the Multi-voice Jazz Companion App, it was built by Drexel postdoctoral research associate Ray Migneco and Drexel electrical engineering student Julie Borgeot. The app, which produces a transcription of multiple parts in a musical piece, is for composers and musicians. It calls to mind Java Auto Music (J.A.M.),the music transcriber that won PennApps Fall 2012.

Music Hack Day is a national event that Drexel University and Somerville, Mass.-based music intelligence startup Echo Nest brought to Philly. Twenty-five projects were built at Drexel’s ExCITe Center over the weekend-long hackathon, including Bluthify.me, an Arrested Development web app that produces character-themed playlists and Dealbreaker, a dating app that eliminates people with incompatible music tastes.

Second place went to Are You Happy Now?, a tool that charts the happiness of top songs through history.

Find the full list of projects here.

Read Echo Nest’s post about the event here. Read WXPN’s post about the event here.