This month I attended my first MusicHackDay event in . I went along with work colleague and we managed to implement ““, which stands for “Fast Forward Time Machine”. The idea is that the user types in the name of a music artist, and FFTM will play a selection of music samples by the artist over the span of their career, in chronological order. There is also a basic speech system implemented on top of the music which narrates the song name and the year of the release.
Implemented in Python, this is how it works:
- Firstly, we query the MusicBrainz database for the artist.
- Then we check for available MP3 previews of songs in 7Digital.
- After that we cap the number of tracks per year to N number of tracks.
- The previews are downloaded.
- The text to speech DJ starts to introduce the artist playlist with a variety of phrases that are randomly generated.
- Each of the previews are played one after the other with supporting transition effects.
- For each song the DJ mentions the Year of the release and the name of the song.
Here is what it looks like: