The first Music Hackathon in Bulgaria is already a reality

Here is something for my non-Bulgarian readers. I'd like to tell you about the first Bulgarian Music Hackathon. During the last weekend of January, the first competition for innovative projects and technologies related to music was held in Sofia.

What is, in fact, a Music Hackathon?

The Music Hackathon is an initiative that's getting more and more popular around the world. It's aimed at giving the floor to professionals from various backgrounds and at letting them play and explore music and technologies. Such competitions are regularly held in different countries but the most popular of them are the Monthly Music Hackathons in New York City.

Every last weekend of each month is reserved for musicians, programmers, scientists, composers and engineers to experiment, to present an innovative project or to search for new audiences or sponsors.

The theme of each of the monthly hackathons in New York is different - music visualization, an invention of new musical instruments, games, science, health, and music, education and music etc.

Music Hackathon Bulgaria

The first Music Hackathon ever held in Bulgaria was organized by Milena Krumova from EduTechFlag - a university professor and promoter of innovative teaching technologies. The event was hosted by the Software University in Sofia.

In an interview for e-music.bg, Krumova commented that she got inspired to organize such an event in Bulgaria after she participated in one of the New York

hackathons, namely the Education Music Hackathon. Actually, the winner in the Bulgarian competition will have the opportunity to visit the Monthly Music Hackathon NYC.

In fact, the participants in the Music Hackathon in Bulgaria were rather free to choose the domain they want to innovate in, as 5 different categories were available:

• Visualization of Music
• Applications of Innovation in Music
• Entertainment, Sound and Lyrics
• Music Robots
• Music, Physics and Science

I suppose that the topics of the forthcoming hackathons will be getting more and more specific.

It is interesting to note that around 80 people from various nationalities and backgrounds participated in the event. For less than 2 days, 12 quite interesting projects were developed.

And the winner was Indian Manasui Mishra (I can only hope it's written correctly :)). He and his team impressed the jury with a complex software solution allowing musicians located in different places to co-create online and in real time.

Details on the rest of the projects can be found here.

Krumova also commented that the second edition of the hackathon is already scheduled and that it will be focused on the Bulgarian bagpipe, a purely Bulgarian symbol.

I can't wait! :)

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