Annual Abbey Road Red Demo Day held in Studio Two

08 February 2019 - Press release

MUSIC TECH INCUBATOR INTRODUCES NEW START-UP AND GRADUATING START-UPS
SPECIAL GUEST SIRI CO-FOUNDER TOM GRUBER
 
Abbey Road Red, the music tech incubator from Abbey Road Studios, hosted its annual Red Demo Day yesterday. Casting a spotlight on the latest graduates and introducing the new start-up joining the programme, LifeScore, the event was held in Abbey Road’s iconic Studio Two. Bringing together the most exciting and innovative developments within the technology industry, the evening provided a rare opportunity to meet the start-ups and hear more about Red’s advancements in music technology. During the event, Isabel Garvey, Managing Director of Abbey Road Studios, introduced special guest and Siri co-founder Tom Gruber, who has just joined LifeScore. Speaking in front of a full house, Tom Gruber discussed the intersection between AI and humanity.
 
Founded in 2015, Abbey Road Red is Europe’s first music tech incubator and has become a highly regarded and hugely successful incubation programme. Over the past four years Abbey Road Red has incubated fourteen businesses, spanning AI, adaptive and generative music, immersive audiovisual projection, social media marketing, lyric visualisation and smart production assistant tools. The 14 start-ups have a collective valuation between $125m and $150m.
 
Isabel Garvey, Managing Director, Abbey Road Studios says: ‘When we created Abbey Road Red we were ahead of the curve in launching a music tech incubator, and the amazing journey we’ve taken with our 14 companies so far has seen us ride that curve into very exciting territory, especially with the pervasiveness of AI across the value chain and the merging of the tech and music industries.’
 
Karim Fanous, Red Innovation Manager says: ‘Our start-ups are pushing innovation boundaries in every sense, whether creating machine intelligent microphones, generative and adaptive music platforms, AI-powered mastering and shapeshifting tools, immersive projection systems, lyric visualisations in realtime, and new licensing frameworks for social media creators using music. We are trying to live and breathe innovation with our founders as well as help add to that air with our incubation support.’
 
Tom Gruber, Siri and LifeScore Co-Founder, says “we’re looking at a new way of doing music, which is a collaboration between human expertise, human taste, and human raw talent in creating music and recording it, with the machine’s ability to combine those things and generate music all day long. And make it sound like a human made it.”
 
Philip Sheppard, LifeScore Founder, says “This is a platform. It’s a language. The important thing is that when you put this in someone’s hands and they’re not a musician… suddenly they get ownership of it. ‘That’s now mine: I’m carving music in time and space’. This is something that’s endlessly adaptive from something that was recorded here at Abbey Road and it soundtracks your days and nights.”
 
During the Demo Day, Abbey Road Red also presented the graduating start-ups and previous alumni demonstrating advancements in the use of machine intelligence, algorithms, music metadata and licensing frameworks, as well as immersive content projection.
 
NEW START-UP ON THE PROGRAMME
 
LifeScore:
LifeScore is a ground-breaking adaptive music platform that takes the highest quality musical cells, recorded at Abbey Road studios, devised by virtuoso composer and founder CEO Philip Sheppard, performed by expert session orchestra players, and processes them with an adaptive engine that creates constantly evolving and personalised versions of the music.
 
It’s adaptive music that sounds like it’s been composed and performed by humans. An organic and high-quality starting point combined with adaptive algorithms that enables you to have your own musicians performing in your handset/living room/environment. LifeScore becomes a constantly evolving soundtrack to your life.
 
GRADUATING START-UPS
Broomx Technologies:
Experts in the creation of immersive experiences in real spaces, Broomx Technologies are the makers of the MK Player360, a unique projection device to enjoy interactive VR applications & 360° media without the need for individual headsets. The team have also created BroomxVR, a community platform where VR artists & content creators can share and monetise their productions. This patented system is able to work in any room or corner, with a wide range of applications, and it is currently making an impact in a number of sectors such as health, education, tourism, engineering, events production & retail.
 
COTODAMA:
COTODAMA are bringing lyric culture back to centre-stage with their intelligent lyric synchronisation and visualisation software, which manifests itself in their Lyric Speaker, the soon to be released Lyric Speaker Canvas and the co-developed rekordbox with Pioneer DJ. Their Expression Engine creates lyric visuals in real-time matching song mood, structure and lyric timing information. The Lyric Speakers showcase the potential of the lyric visualisation capabilities, whilst the technology itself can be integrated into many different applications from concert screens to smart speakers, making COTODAMA’s technology both versatile and visually stunning
 
Humtap:
Humtap is a generative composition app for iOS devices that brings AI music creation to mobile devices. The consumer-facing app transforms user inputs (humming and tapping) into songs in a number of different genres and styles with the option to add a vocal track and video to your creations. Employing technologies such as artificial intelligence, music information retrieval (MIR) and digital signal processing (DSP), Humtap is democratising the music creation process.
 
Lickd:
Better music means better content, but YouTube's leading creators are not using commercial music for fear of a copyright claim and losing their ad revenue. Lickd is the first commercial music licensing platform for online digital Creators; Creators pre-pay a fee per track linked to the size of their audience and our proprietary software - "Vouch" - manages the claim through Content ID, ensuring licensed users continue to receive their ad revenue. First to market, first to license commercial music and the first claims free experience for Creators and all over the world.
 
ALUMNI IN ATTENDANCE
Vochlea Music:
Vochlea is a music technology company with a focus on audio-controlled interfaces for music creation. Their launch product, a handheld device similar to a microphone called Dubler and which will launch via Kickstarter in Spring, converts your vocals into instrumentation. Personalised to the vocal profile of the user, it is able to interpret sounds the user makes and translate them into the desired musical expression. Imagine a device where your beatboxing can trigger drum samples in real-time, your humming is translated into a controlled and intricate guitar melody. This is the power of Vochlea.
 
AI Music:
The mission of AI Music is simple to shape the future of music creation and consumption. They are exploring what happens when you apply the latest techniques in artificial intelligence to music creation; they think this is the next leap in music's evolution, to change it from a static process of a one-directional interaction, to one of a universal dynamic co-creation.
 
Scored:
Scored is a next generation library music service, with a mission to enhance storytelling and profitability for all stakeholders across all mediums, efficiently and at scale. By combining an intuitive and beautifully designed user interface with a new form of dynamic composition, the Scored Sync multi-platform solution allows users to create dynamic soundtracks that are sculpted to match the on-screen action and cues.