media artist in residence
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Spotify's resident media artist program unlocks the power and beauty of data
It's always a gamble for a company to attach itself to an artist. But Spotify sees it as a natural extension of its corporate culture. For a company that holds regular hackathons and hack weeks, in which employees are encouraged to experiment and step outside of the box, bringing in a resident artist just makes sense. Kyle McDonald, an adjunct professor at ITP, is kicking off the company's new Media Artist in Residence program (after hounding the company on Twitter) with Serendipity, a web app that shows when two people start playing the same song simultaneously. All the app does is tap into Spotify's API and look for when a song starts in two locations within 100ms of each other. Then it highlights them on a map that zooms in and out, and dances about. Shockingly, this happens at least 10 times a second! Kyle said that for the most popular songs up to 10 different people will queue them up at the exact same moment, but for the purposes of his experiment he stuck with only displaying two instances.
