REF2021 11Z_ICS_C Intelligent Music Production: saving time for experienced engineers, lowering barriers to entry for hobbyists

  • Ryan Stables (Research Participant)
  • Jason Hockman (Research Participant)

    Impact: Other impacts

    Description of impact

    Dr Ryan Stables and colleagues’ research into how computers can be trained to understand the human vocabulary of sound has led to a level of intelligent automation that is unprecedented in commercial music production. Since 2014, the BCU team has introduced a suite of adaptive software plugins (SAFE) which have been used by well-known music studios to create commercial recordings, as well as downloaded by 15,000 music-creators in 20 countries. The software makes the technical and creative process easier for professionals to perform complex and tedious mixing tasks, and for amateurs and early careerists to bypass many years’ costly learning of how to process sound. The team have developed a next-generation Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), facilitating real-time collaborative music production and embedding machine learning capabilities into the production workflow; this is being commercialised by a university spin-out, Semantic Audio Labs (SAL), which raised an initial GBP500,000 of seed-funding, employs 6 full-time staff, and has a number of pending patents.
    Impact date20162020
    Category of impactOther impacts