Who are you at Neutone?

Hello! My name is Alfie and I’m an AI Application Engineer at Neutone. I’m also a guitarist and composer with a soft spot for unconventional sound design. Working with neural audio has given me a fascinating chance to discover new sounds and skew old favorites along the way. The modern digital audio workstation has given us an arsenal of advanced tools with clinical precision – neural effects tip the balance back ever so slightly in favor of chaos, and I think that’s a good thing.

What do you work on?

Like everyone at Neutone, I wear many hats across both creative and technical work. On the technical side, I’ve been heading up the backend development for Neutone Gen, our neural sampler plugin that hosts all sorts of AI models. I’ve also been working on some early prototype ideas, which has become a great outlet for my creative side.

Why are you doing this?

For many years I’ve been captivated by a mantra from the legendary video game composer Mick Gordon; “Change the process, change the outcome”. What is neural audio if not a monumental disruption to our established creative processes?

What do you hope Neutone Morpho offers artists/musicians?

Texture! There are many ways to use Morpho, but for me, it’s a texture machine. It really shines when blending the dry and wet channels – it’s like sprinkling some sonic spice on an otherwise dull input. I suppose you could also go nuts and chain all the vocal models in parallel to make some kind of Lovecraftian choir abomination, who am I to stop you?!

What’s next in store?

In the search for new Morpho sounds we’ve been training a LOT of new models, and many won’t make the final cut. My talented colleague Kay recently trained a model that turns any input into death metal vocals, and I have to make some music with that!

What are you listening to these days? 🎧

I love music with strong cinematic atmospheres, and dark ambient music really pulls me in with its stories and visceral soundscapes. Shout out to Cryo Chamber on Bandcamp! You can also check out some of my own music here.