A team of first-year computer scientists won the grand prize OF $1,024 at HopHacks, the bi-annual 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 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,” said pianist and clarinetist Lawrence Mao.
Mao’s teammate’s, pianist Ricky Cheng and violinists Tyler Shin and Xiangyu Shen, split up into groups to manage different parts of the coding process.
The team plans to use the prize money to further improve the app. “We’re looking to develop a mobile app and put it on the App Store and Play Store online platform; the money will help us get licenses for that too!” said Xiangyu Shen.
HopHacks brings engineers, designers, and entrepreneurs together to explore new ideas, compete for prizes, and create amazing applications. For 36 hours, students work in teams of up to four to bring a software or hardware idea to life.
This year, local entrepreneurs, sponsors, JHU alumni and professors judged the 40 projects submitted. The three-day competition closed with an award ceremony on Sunday, September 15, 2019. There were over 10 sponsored prizes, totaling more than $4,000. For a full list of projects and awards, click here.