#smackathon

Is Blockchain The Solution The Music Industry Is Looking For?

Blockchain for supply chain ,  Blockchain for KYC ,  Blockchain for gaming !!  You will hear about all sorts of applications that are being developed industry-wise using the blockchain technology. But have you ever wondered why it is happening?  Well, the answer lies in the definition of the blockchain itself.  Blockchain, if put simply, is a form of a database which is not centralized.  A database that’s not centralized seems surprising to many but it is here to stay.   A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography. Each block typically contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp and transaction data. By design, a blockchain is inherently resistant to modification of the data. It is an open, distributed, decentralized ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. (Wikipedia)   I have covered in detail the basics of blockchain on  CoinSutra . Here is   The Ultimate Guide To Understanding What A “Blockchain” Is & How It Works  .  By harnessing the similar features of the blockchain tech, the music industry is also trying to fix its pain points.  Through this article, I intend to pass on the message of how blockchain is being applied to the music industry.  Blockchain For Music Industry In Making…      The music industry, due to the centralized and mediated nature of production and distribution, suffers mainly through these following issues:   Piracy Of Digital Records  Improper Rights Management  Cumbersome Royalty Management  Delay In Rewards To Artists etc…   Apart from that, the irony is despite digital records the artists cannot get real-time data for their production which otherwise would have helped them improve and strengthen their marketing efforts.  And you know there is a problem when such key insights aren’t available despite an industry being online & digital.  But being online or digital doesn’t solve the problem alone as the main issue is that different digital platforms or brands through which the actual distribution of music happens are like silos of information which don’t talk to each other.  For example, even if an artist sells his/her music on Song Music, Apple Music, and Google Play Music, they don’t get the actual picture of what is happening overall digitally to their product. They don’t have insights that can be conclusive. That is why, when you have a database like blockchain it becomes easy to make conclusive insights.  And there is more:  These production and distribution houses that act as agents take a hefty amount from the earnings of the actual musical product and very less gets passed on to the actual artists.  In some scenarios, this reward has been as low as 10-20% for the artists and can take up to 2-3 years in actually reaching the artist’s bank account. This problem can be solved with autonomous  smart contracts  hosted on the blockchain which pays the artists at the point of sale itself in a matter of minutes.  Some start-ups have already started doing this. (We will talk about them further in the article).  On top of that, piracy problems bring down the overall sales of the music records that results in a loss to its creator. And that’s because these labeled houses aren’t efficient enough to prevent piracy to occur.  But with blockchain-based cloud storage platforms, the problem can also be solved where the actual records are broken into many pieces and stored in a distributed way.  And the good thing is, these can be reassembled on demand upon a paid request from the consumer.  Last but not the least, the most complicated problem of  rights management  can also be solved by the blockchain. And through this, royalty management and distribution amongst various entities such as composers, producers, publishers, and singer can be done in an effective way.  Blockchain For Music & More…  Parallelly, the onset of music-centered blockchain is catching up very fast and the cryptocurrency space has developed quite a few music management blockchains by now for various uses, some of which are:    Ujo    Vibrate    Mycelia    Blokur    Having said that, we should understand the fact that blockchain might not solve all the ills of the music industry but it is certainly a very strong alternative to fix some of the age-old friction points.  If the artists are paid well and don’t need to worry about the monetary aspect, they will be motivated to produce better content for their supporters.  And this aspect of blockchain has been recognized by quite a few artists around the world who have started launching their music on the blockchain. Some of the examples are:    Imogen Heap    RAC    Giraffage    To add to it, Pitbull, the famous American rapper, has recently understood the worth of blockchain for the music industry and has tweeted about his  Smakathon-A blockchain music challenge  for the developers to solve the problems of the music industry.   It’s time for a major change in the music industry! Blockchain developers, we need your help to empower artists worldwide.   Learn more at  https://t.co/pPfBjux1g4  #emergeamericas   #openzeppelin   #smackathon   https://t.co/G2jqnpBLJJ   — Pitbull (@pitbull)  April 25, 2018      That’s it from me in this article but stay tuned to  CoinSutra  for more blockchain and cryptocurrency related information as we are going to cover some of the good blockchain projects related to music industry very soon.    Hope you enjoyed this write-up. If you did, do share it with your friends and family.    Further suggested readings from  CoinSutra :    GameCredits: Everything Beginners Need To Know    Neblio Cryptocurrency: Everything You Need To Know    Top Free Blockchain & Cryptocurrency Courses/Certifications    Best Gaming-Based Cryptocurrencies To Invest In This Year    Looking To Buy Monero/XMR? Here Are The Top 5 Sites For You    The post  Is Blockchain The Solution The Music Industry Is Looking For?  appeared first on  CoinSutra - Bitcoin Community .

https://coinsutra.com/blockchain-music-industry/

Smackathon 2014

Every year at Smule, we sound the horns of Smackathon, our homegrown version of the hackathon. The goal is simple: Come up with a product idea and build it. 

This year, on April 16th, we continued this honored tradition. For 48 hours, 23 of our top developers and designers brainstormed, designed, hacked, “smacked” and polished their ideas, shaping them into reality.

This year’s competition was vicious, and the teams pulled out all the stops. We heard mad rhymes from Team AutoRap On The Bus, glorious mashups from Team Smashup, and witnessed Team Autofinger demonstrate a fully functioning robotic finger that would point out productivity in the office. With so many outstanding projects, our judges had to deliberate for hours to select winners.

Read on to find out which projects won awards, as well as summaries of the projects. In the coming weeks, we’ll tell you more about individual project and introduce you to the brains behind them.

Hello friends,

Just wanted to drop you a quick note mentioning the winners of the 1st ever Smackathon. I personally had a ton of fun coordinating and participating in this event. As you can see, the results were simply amazing!

After the event concluded, we retreated as a company to a lovely house in San Francisco for our Smule Summer party. Here, each team presented their finished product to their peers and a panel of esteemed judges.

After the presentations, the judges convened to determine the winner for each of the following categories:

Best use of sound: Super Sing!

Team “Born in the 90s” - Nick R (all by himself)

"Super Sing puts the user in complete control of a giant group singing experience."

Most Innovative: Obamatron

Team America - Parag C, Mark G, Randal L, Ian S

Inspired in part by Jimmy Fallon’s, “Brian Williams Raps Snoop Dog,” we strove to create an app which would allow Obama to sing any of the 700+ songs in the catalog of our karaoke app Sing! A second, complementary mode lets Obama sing any lyrics one types into the app.

Most Likely to make it into a Smule Product: Sing! Battle

Team Awesome - Mike A, Greg T

"Singing is fun; beating your friends at singing is funner. We built a delightfully fast, competitive way to let the people know that when it comes down to laying down a verse from Lady Marmalade, Can’t Fight This Feeling, or Gangsta’s Paradise, YOU are Number 1!"

Best use of Smule Data: Smule Pulse

Team Chereshka - Svilen I, Asen L, Georgi M

"Smule Pulse visualizes the data of performances, comments, loves and listens from the past 10 minutes in various ways to make it easy to comprehend."

Smackathon Project - Super Sing

Super Sing is the smackathon project created by team “Born-in-the-90s,” the solo team consisting of me, Nick R. Utilizing Smule’s unique access to millions of karaoke recordings from our “Sing! Karaoke” application, Super Sing puts the user in complete control of a giant group singing experience. Watch the demo above and read on to learn more!

An Overview

The demo above shows a Super Sing performance of Call Me Maybe, consisting of 100+ top singers from the Sing! Karaoke application. Each vertical line represents a single vocal track (vocals only), ie. a single person singing somewhere in the world. In this particular demo, the mouse is moved around near the bottom of the screen to dynamically switch between individual singers (or by placing the mouse between two lines, a duet of singers). By raising the mouse towards the top of the screen more singers are dynamically pulled into the performance, seamlessly blended together without audio clipping or distortion. At the very top of the screen, all 100+ singers are singing together in a full-on Super Sing performance.

Note, there is also a Leap Motion compatible mode in the application, which allows complete control of the Super Sing performance just by moving your fingers in the front of the computer in 3D space. Perhaps I can upload a video of this interaction in the future.

The Details

As with all the hackathon projects, Super Sing was put together from start to finish in under 48 hours. To start, I used code from the Sing! Karaoke iPhone application itself to download 75 of the top vocal performances of Call Me Maybe (each of which can consist of a single singer or multiple singers, resulting in 100+ unique singers). I then used Apple’s CoreAudio programming framework to write a simple audio graph that could dynamically mix all the vocal tracks together with the background. To achieve this, all the vocal tracks are streaming together at all times, with most of them at 0 volume. Then, based on the mouse location on screen, the volume of vocal tracks are raised and lowered, shifting in real time between individual performances, group performances, and blending possibly all 100 together. The background track for the song is always running at full volume behind all these vocal tracks to create the final sound you hear being dynamically generated.

Once I had the audio working to my liking, I turned my attention to graphics. At heart I am truly a graphics programmer, and love nothing more in the field of computer science than real-time graphics and simulation. In the spirit of the hackathon, I used this opportunity to try a new graphics approach, and built the entire application on the GPU (graphic processing unit). I won’t bore you with the all details of GPU programming and the benefits it provides, but I urge you to Google it if you have the interest. Most modern day applications use the GPU to speed up complex graphics tasks in conjunction with the traditional CPU. By generating the graphics for my application entirely on the GPU, I give the CPU complete freedom to focus solely on the complicated audio rendering. This is what allows streaming 100+ vocal tracks simultaneously while also displaying sophisticated, colorful, and dynamically alive graphics.

Retrospective

The Team: Awesome

The Members: Greg & Mike .....with plenty of TLC from Stefan, Nelson, Lynnens, Jess, Berger, and Turner.

Product Description: Singing is fun; beating your friends at singing is funner. We built a delightfully fast, competitive way to let the people know that when it comes down to laying down a verse from Lady Marmalade, Can't Fight This Feeling, or Gangsta's Paradise, YOU are Number 1!

Spawning off a little last minute inspiration from the Smule community, team “Also-Awesome” hacked together a way for people in the Sing! Meetups Group to place themselves on a virtual map using hashtags on their favorite performances. In doing so, a visual representation of where clusters of people exist has been created so as to help facilitate planning meetups.

The Inspiration

Firstly — “AdrianSings” conjured up some inspiration when he made the following post, which asked us to develop a way for the Meetups Group to be able to drop pins on a map identifying where they were located

The Implementation

Shae saw this post, confirmed that it wouldn’t be too hard to automate, and Nick suggested the use of a hashtag to identify the people who wanted to be placed on the map.

A post was made in the Meetups Group, asking for people to put the #SingMeetups hashtag on their favorite solo performance in order to carry out Adrian’s vision. This caused 27 performances to be tagged in a very short period of time.

We found the GPS location data for each performance and put it in a spreadsheet

Then imported the .CSV file into a custom google map, and BAM! It functioned as a crude prototype.

The Design

Hannah mocked up a final design which looked beautiful! The location in the final design will only show the city where a person lives instead of their Lat/Lon coordinates in order to maintain privacy.

Future Iterations

In the future, this way displaying a hashtag on the globe could be automatically generated in a number of ways and will be very useful for visualizing any number of trending hashtags, or just creating a playlist of songs and making it more visually interesting instead of having the songs in a list or queue. A global visualization of this type could also be generated for any filter of Sing! Performances such as Song, Artist, Performer, or any Hashtag or Searchable Query.

GG Team Also Awesome!!!

Smackathon, day one. Mood, awesome.

The theme, waves, was announced at 5PM today. Immediately after, everyone broke into groups and stormed some brains.

Last minute dinner orders were successful, aside from the two hour wait.

After enough brains, we reconvened as a group and pitched ideas. Concepts ranged from karaoke battles to drum circle apps(and one team plans to make America great again).

Once teams were formed, Michael Berger and the content team wasted no time getting to work on a 100% recycled vuvuzela/didgeridoo .

Parker stayed close to ensure bandwidth was used appropriately. Meanwhile, digital hacking began! Chuck was heads down, starting designs for his team’s electronic DJ app, Nick was researching all things waves, Team America was saving our country, and Mike was flow(doc)in’ like I’ve never seen before.

By the end of the evening we had celebrated a birthday(e.g. Lynn), and laid the ground work for some amazing prototypes!

All in all, a great first night! Well done everyone!

Smuleans around the globe(but mostly in Bulgaria) are still smacking as of this moment! So stay tuned for more substantial updates tomorrow as these projects begin to take shape! Cya!