On December 14-15, 2024, the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London became a hive of innovation for the first ever MuseHub Hackathon. This 24-hour developer marathon united coders, musicians, designers, and tech enthusiasts, all driven by a shared passion for music technology and a simple goal: form a team, and create an app or plug-in within 24 hours. Suitable projects will be published on MuseHub for everyone to try out.
To achieve greatness, two things are needed; A plan, and not quite enough time.
– Leonard Bernstein
Participants from diverse backgrounds—including product managers, audio developers, and creatives—collaborated to craft innovative music applications within 24 hours. Projects spanned audio utilities, music generators, sound effects, and even the beginnings of an augmented reality Digital Audio Workstation, showcasing the endless possibilities at the intersection of music and technology.
Throughout the event, industry experts provided mentorship, offering technical assistance and insights into cutting-edge tools.
A panel of judges then evaluated the completed projects, selecting the most innovative and suitable creations to release on MuseHub, making them available for everyone to try. MuseHub’s mission is to inspire and launch great startups, so a hackathon is the perfect place to get the creative juices flowing, network, meet likeminded devs and get stuck in on the next big thing. With 70 places and over 90 sign-ups, we knew it was going to be a dynamic event.
12 teams presented their projects in 3-5 minutes. Watch back the recording of the livestream to discover what was built in 24 hours!
And the Winners are…
Music Transcription Studio
The winners of the “Ready for MuseHub” category are Klangio, for their incredible Music Transcription Studio app. The developers used Electron to turn their existing web service into a full desktop app, with new features over the weekend. Music Transcription Studio is seriously impressive: it uses AI models to create notated scores (or MIDI files) from audio recordings — for both solo and ensembles! It even recognises and transcribes the lyrics.
Collider
Next came Collider, a plugin with a playful user interface that allows to generate rhythms and soundscapes from circles bumping onto the walls. Watch out for Collider, as it’ll collide its way into MuseHub soon!
Ambiful
Third in this category came Ambiful, a stereo granular effect plugin, allowing musicians to transform their sounds by spreading its elements across the stereo spectrum. Ambiful is also expected to be on Muse Hub soon, stay tuned!
Honourable Mentions
There was a lot of creativity and ingenuity on display. Some of the projects worked on included:
Memoloop
A super fun looper for iOS that works much like a traditional tape loop. Record, cut in, speed up, and slow down for unique effects.
DAW-XR: Mixed Reality Digital Audio Workstation in a Browser
DAW-XR is a browser-based Mixed Reality Digital Audio Workstation that brings your music into an immersive 3D world, letting you edit and visualize tracks in real-time with WebXR.
RelaxSync
Monitors your heartbeat and adapts music according to your stress levels. Perfect for bringing down the cortisol levels through music, and helping with meditating!
Heel-Toe Footstep Generator
Foley is a large and complex task for games, television, and film—such as ensuring footsteps align with character movement. This innovative app combines two recordings to create near-infinite combinations, making it much faster to get up and running (pun intended) on sound design sessions.
JamSync
Record or submit videos to build a track—it’s like a synchronized Zoom session that you can playback and add video participants to at any point. Great fun and perfect for creating music videos with multiple remote participants and contributors.
Windchime
This innovative plugin uses real-time wind data to simulate windchimes blowing in the breeze. Use it to create pseudo-random patterns or as an organic data source for triggering synths or instruments.
Audio Spectrum Analyser
A powerful and functional analyser that displays input signals in the frequency domain. Super useful for monitoring and identifying problem areas in a mix.
The team wrote this plugin using C Major, a new audio development framework, learning it from scratch at the Hackathon. Going from zero to plugin in 24 hours on a new framework is seriously impressive!
Discover all the winners, participants, and the technology and community partners on the Gallery page.
We look forward to bringing more of these projects to MuseHub soon. A huge thanks and congratulations to all that took part. We’ll see you all again soon!
Leave a Reply