Ableton at MIDI HACK Stockholm

This year saw the first edition of MIDI Hack, a weekend-long hackathon dedicated to imagining the future of performance and control in music, using MIDI and other protocols. Hosted by our friends at Spotify, MIDI HACK brought together a number of inspired developers, musicians, and hardware fanatics with some seriously impressive results.

We spent a thoroughly engaging weekend getting to know a diverse group of hackers, assisting where we could, and hosting workshops on Live and Push’s APIs, and Max for Live.

We were thrilled to see the number of projects utilizing Live - many with innovative and imaginative Max for Live devices. From endless generative techno tracks to music made from dripping water, it was truly difficult to pick favorites from among this incredible group. See a full list of projects from MIDI Hack.

In the end, our chosen winner was “Look Mum, No Hands”, a hack by Yuli Levtov. Transcending the traditional concept of a MIDI controller, Yuli designed a Max for Live device which sends control signals when it detects user-defined vocal phrases - e.g. sing short tune and trigger a Clip. Watch Yuli explain his cool device:

Learn more about “Look Mum, No Hands”. Stay tuned for more about Yuli and his special hack on Ableton.com.

Have you hacked up a project that you’d like to let us know about? Tag us on Facebook or Twitter, and use #MadeWithLive.