A team of first-year computer science majors from Johns Hopkins won the $1,024 grand prize at HopHacks, the biannual hackathon held this fall on the Homewood Campus. Their music app, Noteshift, allows users to submit music through the team’s website and select which key they want to transpose it to. Based on the user’s input, Noteshift automatically transposes the music and uploads a downloadable PDF of the new music.
The team members—who are also musicians—saw the need to create an app that can assist with the efficiency of transposing music.
“I first got the idea when I was manually transposing music in orchestra. I wished for a simple application that would take in my sheet music and swiftly transpose it,” says pianist and clarinetist Lawrence Mao.
Mao’s team—comprising pianist Ricky Cheng and violinists Tyler Shin and Xiangyu Shen—split up into groups to manage different parts of the coding process. He and his teammates plan to use their prize money to further improve the app.
The Noteshift team presents at HopHacks.
“We’re looking to develop a mobile app and put it on the App Store and Google Play; the money will help us get licenses for that, too!” says Shen.
HopHacks brings engineers, designers, and entrepreneurs together to explore new ideas, compete for prizes, and create clever applications. Each semester, students work in teams of up to four for 36 hours to bring a software or hardware idea to life.
This fall, local entrepreneurs, sponsors, alumni, and faculty judged the 40 projects submitted. The three-day competition closed with an awards ceremony on Sunday, September 15, which included over 10 sponsored prizes totaling more than $4,000. View the full list of the submitted projects and awards here.