Words by Danielle Longueville; Pictures by Zep Owell
This past weekend, UNT hosted what they called a music hackathon. A “Hackathon” is a 24-hour event dedicated developing creative and innovative ideas to solving a problem or that would benefit a predetermined theme. The event is dedicated to changing the way people perceive music through composition, production, promotion, or even how people listen to music itself. The goal is to take this short amount of time given and come up with something people may not have thought of creating on their own.
UNT's Innovation Greenhouse, the organization which created the Hackathon, is actually pretty damned cool. It's a co-working space for students' innovation activities. It collaborates and leverages with existing university resources while building new partnerships with the North Texas region businesses, startups, not-for-profit organizations, and governmental agencies. It fosters a lot of new ideas and encourages collaboration and co-working.
The Innovation Greenhouse UNT are what we call “Hackaholics.” They love attending Hackathons of all kinds, so much that they decided to host their own. They've done everything from Big Data to Health and Wellness to Food to Renewable Energy Hackathons. Because of Denton’s traditional reputation for having a thriving music and arts culture, UNT believed that the Denton community deserved the opportunity to show off their fine-tuned talents at a Music Hackathon. This year, they wanted to kick it up a notch and try to involve the community as much as possible, and there’s been a lot of positive feedback and desire to be involved. For instance, this past weekend, they partnered with the American Heart Association Heartwalk 5k by providing local bands to play for their runners as a result of their interest in supporting our Music Hackathon.
Co-founder of Prekindle.com, Dave Howard, kicked off the weekend as keynote speaker, and we also heard from three other speakers from various niches within the music industry. People such as Tim Harman from the Ghost Note, Dustin Blocker Co-Owner of Hand Drawn Records, and Christy Crytzer-Pierce, who is UNT Adjunct Faculty and long-time PR Wizard all spoke at the Hackathon.
But this event wasn't just for coders and tech people. From musicians to developers, to people who are just music enthusiasts with creative imaginations - everyone was welcomed, and the result was pretty dang cool. This was a great chance for our community to network and learn about one another’s aspirations on a cultural level.
We're already super stoked about the next Hackathon which we don't even know any info about yet! We'll be sure to pass it on to you, though, as soon as we do.
Keep in touch with UNT's Innovation Greenhouse to find out about future Hackathons. Info can be found at www.untmusichackathon.com or on their Facebook page.