“Beyond the Code” is a section of the meetup where we are able to speak with key individuals in music tech about their journey and perspectives on audio development.

This month we welcome Gerhard Behles, co-founder and CEO of Ableton, one of the most exciting music tech companies within our industry.

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Gerhard Behles (CEO, Ableton)

Beyond The Code

The programs we use to make music have a lot of implicit decisions baked into them, especially in their graphical interfaces. Nestup began as a thought experiment—we were trying to see if embedding a text editor inside Live could open up new creative possibilities. We think the answer is that yes, text can work well alongside a piano roll and a traditional musical score, as a concise and expressive way to define complex rhythms.

With Nestup, you define for yourself any rhythmic unit, rhythmic subdivision, and scaling factor. These language features let you experiment with musical ideas such as metric modulation, nested tuplets, complex polyrhythm, and more. Rhythms from musical styles which would have been prohibitively difficult to program in a DAW can therefore be rendered in MIDI, such as rhythms from Armenian folk musics or “new complexity” compositions.

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Sam Tarakajian & Alex Van Gils (Cycling ’74)

Nestup—A Language for Musical Rhythms

Monthly Meetup (July 13, 2021)

CMajor Updates and Talking Product Design! || The Audio Programmer Meetup Mar 2024

Developing and porting plugins to the Multiverse platform, from UI creation to C++ coding. In this talk, we cover the unique challenges of creating and deploying audio plugins on embedded hardware. We'll introduce the Multiverse platform and show how it addresses these challenges and enables developers to access the stompbox market.

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Steve Lascos (Blackaddr Audio and Aviate Audio)

Developing and porting plugins to the Multiverse platform

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Shane Nolan (Aviate Audio)

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Ryan Jaquin (Aviate Audio)

Quick tour of the AUv3Template repo and what it offers for developing a new AUv3 plugin.
Some focus on the render thread, parameter controls, and MIDI interfacing in Swift and
C++.

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Brad Howes (Squarepoint Capital)

AUv3 Filters for iOS and macOS using AUv3Template

Book presentation:
Audio programming is an exciting intersection between software development, digital signal processing (DSP), and creativity. It's enjoyable and rewarding once you've learned the basics, but how do you get started?

In this book, we introduce you to this exciting world with a step-by-step guide to building a synthesizer plug-in. We provide straight-forward explanations to the concepts and keep the math simple.

Why build a synthesizer? Building a synth plug-in is a fantastic way to learn and walk through some of the fundamental concepts of audio programming.

Matthijs Hollemans (Indie)

Creating Synth Plug-Ins with JUCE

 The Audio Programmer Virtual Meetup (Dec 12, 2023 at 18:30 UK)

We will go through the elements necessary to build a high-performance globally distributed software development team. Looking at topics like hiring, processes, rituals, tools and values.

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Jens Brosbøl-Ravnborg (XMT Audio)

Building a Global Audio Programming Team

Adam Fligsten and Nolan Vernon of Silen Audio explain the design struggles for creating Infinite Flow, a modern synthesizer, with an analog soul.
They will discuss the pitfalls they avoided, as well as the unexpected issues that arose as a new audio team. 

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Adam Fligsten (Silen Audio)

The Unseen Challenges of Crafting a Synthesizer from Scratch

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Nolan Vernon (Silen Audio)

In this talk, I'm going to talk about how we built FM Bison - an open source FM synthesizer using the JUCE framework.  I'll talk about some of the challenges along the way and what helps make this synth unique!

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Neils Johannes de Wit (Indie Audio Programmer)

Building FM Bison with JUCE

 The Audio Programmer Virtual Meetup (Nov 7, 2023 at 18:30 UK)

In this presentation, the speaker will discuss and demonstrate the encapsulation of ValueTrees within 'domain-specific' classes, facilitating the transfer of a single ValueTree root object to client code.

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Chris Roberts (Independent Software Engineer)

ValueTree Wrappers: Data model without dealing with ValueTree's in your client code

In this talk, Kyle will discuss the results of an analysis of interviews with 13 professional video game composers about their considerations and concerns about AI driven music technology and how this informs the ways we should be building AI tools if we want to see them adopted in the mainstream. Kyle will then discuss how this informed the development of his expressive rendering deep learning algorithm (Cue-Free Express), which allows non-expressive midi to be performed as if played by a human, with the goal of being a new 'Humanise' tool for composers.

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Kyle Worrall (Music Computing and Psychology Lab, University of York)

Understanding how to design AI driven music technology for increased acceptance by musicians

 The Audio Programmer Virtual Meetup (Oct 10, 2023 at 18:30 UK)

In this talk, we'll explore NeuralNote, an open-source audio-to-MIDI plugin built over Spotify’s BasicPitch model. We’ll dive into the technical aspects of the plugin and gain general insights into the use of machine learning in audio plugins.

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Damien Ronnsin (Minimal Audio)

NeuralNote - An audio-to-MIDI plugin using Machine Learning

Audio buffers are a fundamental container used in audio software development for storing and processing audio signals. This talk will give a brief overview of container design in C++, and will walk through an implementation of a new audio buffer class from scratch. Supplementary classes including a buffer "view" class will be presented as well as C++ "iterator" types to simply the process of iterating through an audio buffer.

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Jatin Chowdhury (Chowdhury DSP)

Audio Buffers, Buffer Views, and Buffer Iterators

Monthly Meetup (September 12th, 2023)

The Korg Prologue is a hybrid analogue polyphonic synthesiser released in 2018. In this talk, a digital model of its VCF based on its circuit diagram is put forward, comparisons are drawn, and the process is discussed.

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Modeling the Korg Prologue VCF

Victor Lazzarini (Maynooth University Music Department)

A headfirst dive into the benefits of rephrasing well known algorithmic reverb structures as FDNs (but with "The Matrix" references).

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Freaky Diffuse Noises: Getting Creative with FDNs

Syl Morrison (Kalide Systems, SLM Audio)

This talk is a summary of the experience of and lessons learned from designing an audio programming language in its early stages. I aim to examine the importance of accessible audio languages, and my considerations and ambitions based on real-world usage of pre-existing languages.

The How, What, and Why of Designing an Audio Language

Ryan Jeffares (Kalide Systems, Sound Training College)

Geraint/Signalsmith chats about his journey learning programming, maths and DSP, and when waving away details can be useful.

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The Advantages of Hand-Waving

Geraint Luff (Signalsmith Audio)

This talk will discuss some of the features of the p5.Csound library for p5.js, and showcase how it can be used to quickly develop web based audio applications. 

p5.Csound - A Lightweight Csound Library for p5js

Rory Walsh (Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland)

Ireland Meetup (July 11th, 2023)

I am a junior software engineer based in London. I have worked with the sound stacks team for just under a year, working on the Cmajor platform. My previous studies were in music and audio programming. Alongside work, I co organise dynamic cast, a peer to peer C++ learning group based in Berlin and London.

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Programmer Q&A (Interviewee)

Harriet Drury (Sound Stacks)

Valeriia is a recent computer science graduate from Arizona State University with a background in law. She has been learning about audio in her free time for the past year and is interested in building a career in this field.

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Programmer Q&A (Interviewer)

Valeriia Starosek (Independent)

This talk will be an exploration of LLMs (large language models) to increase developer velocity for audio programming use cases.

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JUCE GPT!?!

Marcus Hobbs (Perfect Buzz Music)

Monthly Meetup (June 13th, 2023)

Warmer Wave Shapers

Geraint Luff (Signalsmith)

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Building Plugin Installers with CMake & CPack

Ben Vining (Independent)

Monthly Meetup (May 9, 2023)

Judges

Ale Koretzky (Splice), David Trevelyan (TikTok), Joshua Reiss (QMUL), Dan Stein (aka DJ Fresh)

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On Another Note: Symbolic Music Generation

Julian Lenz (Pompeu Fabra University)

Neural Audio Plugin Competition (Livestream #6)

AI In Audio Panel

Anna Huang (Google Magenta), David Trevelyan (TikTok), Ale Koretzky (Splice), Zach Evans (Harmonai)

Neural Audio Plugin Competition (Livestream #5)

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Toward Prototyping with Neural Networks on Embedded Hardware

Teresa Pelinkski (Queen Mary University of London)

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Unchain Hidden Power - Latent Space Processing for Music Remixing and Upmixing

Haici Yang (Indiana University)

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AI Death Metal - Eliminating Humans from Music

CJ Carr (Dadabots, Harmonai)

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Beyond the Noise: Exploring the Potential of Audio Effect Removal for Music Production

Johannes Imort (AudioShake)

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How Deep Learning Can Improve Sample Retrieval for Electronic Music Creation

António Ramires (Beatoven.ai)

Neural Audio Plugin Competition (Livestream #4)

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AI in 64Kb: Can We Do More With Less?

Philippe Esling (IRCAM)

RTNeural is a neural inferencing library written in C++. RTNeural is designed to be used in systems with hard real-time constraints, with additional emphasis on speed, flexibility, size, and convenience. This talk will discuss the motivation and design of the library, and give examples of how the library can be used for creating real-time neural audio plugins.

Monthly Meetup (July 13, 2021)

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