Audio Technology Startup RoEx Wins £1/4 million Grant From Innovate UK

02 May 2024 - Press release

Awarded maximum funding in competition for AI development projects to strengthen UK music sector

Queen Mary spin-out aims to unlock new creative and commercial opportunities for creators, producers and rightsholders

Funding will power R&D for first-of-its-kind tool, ProStyle, allowing engineers to licence and scale their mixing style

RoEx, the tech startup driving cutting-edge intelligent audio production tools has been awarded a £250,000 grant by national innovation agency Innovate UK, as part of its “Creative Catalyst: AI in the Music Industry” funding competition.

The grant will support the research and development of RoEx’s new model, ProStyle. This will provide a collaborative platform for mix engineers to partner with RoEx to train a machine learning model that captures their individual creative mixing style.

ProStyle will allow mixing professionals to scale up the volume of creators that benefit from their expertise, using ProStyle to monetise their sonic identity and open up a new revenue stream. Musicians and creators will then be able to mix their tracks in the engineer’s style, using ProStyle as a time-efficient and affordable solution for high-quality mixing. It builds on the success of RoEx’s flagship multitrack mixing tool for consumers, Automix, and its intelligent audio API, Tonn.

The year-long project is a collaboration with Queen Mary University of London, known for its innovative research in audio engineering, audio signal processing, and machine learning.

73 times Platinum-certified and Grammy-winning engineer Rich Keller will act as a technical advisor on the project. RoEx Research Engineer Angeliki Mourgela will lead ProStyle’s development, bringing over 13 years of experience in sound engineering and a PhD in computer science. Working alongside them will be ex-Sony PlayStation engineer Mary Pilataki and Professor Joshua Reiss of Queen Mary University.

Innovate UK’s ‘AI in the Music Industry’ competition allocated up to £1 million in funding to advance the development of AI products and services within the global music supply chain to benefit the UK’s music sector. UK businesses could apply for a share of the funding up to £250,000.

RoEx was previously awarded a grant from Innovate UK in 2023 for work tackling the unique challenges of live music mixing.

David Ronan, CEO at RoEx, said: “We’re incredibly proud to have won our second Innovate UK grant, in less than 2 years since founding the company. Our project marries human creativity with advanced AI to further the availability of creative tools for musicians and producers, while remunerating the engineers who provide their expertise. It keeps the human touch integral to the creative process, making music production more accessible and fostering innovation. Our original proprietary model, which powers both Automix and Mix Check Studio, was trained by the RoEx team to understand what a balanced and polished mix sounds like, instead of being trained on copyrighted material. ProStyle is a natural continuation, providing quick, affordable and ethical ways to achieve high-quality mixes.”

Joshua Reiss, Professor of Audio Engineering at Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London, added: "RoEx and the Audio Engineering team within Queen Mary University of London’s Centre for Digital Music have similar goals; to make music production both more accessible and higher quality. Together, they address the needs of music creators, who strive for professional quality production of their content. In particular, I’m excited to work with the extremely talented RoEx team on this project, where we will pioneer a cutting-edge Style Transfer tool for Music Production (ProStyle). The approach is a fusion of AI with human expertise that not only enhances the creative process but also cultivates a collaborative and ethical music production ecosystem."

Rich Keller said about his involvement in the project: “I’ve worked long and hard at my craft, and I’m happy to share it with anyone interested in intersecting their music with my experience and taste. There is nothing artificial about AI, at least not yet. So far it's merely human intelligence outsourced to processors that are millions of times faster. So, when Dave explained the idea of ProStyle at Flux Studios in NYC last Fall, I jumped at the opportunity to upload everything I know about music into an AI model and share it with the world and our future, working towards ProStyle as a series of reflections of a real person, and a conduit for their craft.”