Who are you at Neutone?

Hi everyone, I’m Christopher, one of the founding engineers of Neutone and a PhD researcher currently based in London. I spent several years working on machine learning projects in computer vision and natural language processing before discovering my favorite modality: audio. My research is now all about time-varying audio, synths, and modulations, although I like to simply describe it as the study of “wubs”. I’m also a musician and played instrumental ukulele and clarinet for seven years, although nowadays I’ve moved on to using just my laptop.

What do you work on?

I mostly build and maintain the open source SDK for Neutone which enables anyone to wrap their own neural audio models in Python and use them in their favorite DAW. I also work on some of the digital signal processing for the plugins and help out with giving presentations and workshops, especially when my location and timezone in Europe is beneficial.

Why are you doing this?

I started working with Nao and the Qosmo team four years ago because I wanted to collaborate with others to make my machine learning research more accessible via interactive art pieces and beautifully designed projects. Neutone is a natural continuation of this motive, but is particularly exciting for me because I’m building a tool that I also want to use. Not only is it a novel instrument to inspire artists, it’s also incredibly useful for prototyping and sharing neural audio research ideas with the wider community.

What do you hope Neutone Morpho offers artists/musicians?

I hope Neutone Morpho offers artists a new perspective on sound design, sonic textures, and the future of digital instruments. There’s a lot of audio research out there being done by musicians that is super inspiring, but is currently inaccessible to most people. My hope is that Neutone Morpho and the Neutone platform as a whole help bridge this gap and expose more people to the possibilities of neural audio systems.

What’s next in store!?

I’m always updating the open source SDK and going through user feedback to try to make the user experience as effortless as possible. I also take advantage of the SDK to release my own PhD research as Neutone models when publishing papers so that other researchers can play with the results themselves in the DAW. We have a bunch of changes and plugins in the works that will greatly enhance the capabilities of the SDK, so keep an eye out for them!

What are you listening to these days? 🎧

I love electronic music, especially experimental bass music that pushes the limits of sound design, combines several sub-genres together, and really tickles your brain in a unique way. Besides having G Jones on repeat for a few years now, I’ve also been listening a lot to KAVARI, Chee, and Noer the Boy lately.