Spent a great couple of days at the Innovation in Music Conference this week. Although the theme of the conference was looking ahead towards future developments in music production, I simultaneously stepped back in time by revisiting Anglia Ruskin University, the venue of my under graduate degree. Within 5 mins of arriving at the conference a familiar face sat down in the chair next to me – Ian Corbett – a peer from university who I played some particularly bad jazz/funk with in a band from the ‘old days’. Ian gave a great talk at the conference on ‘lossy’ compression and it was great to catch up with him since we last saw each other 20 years ago! Also, my old music technology and composition lecturer, Richard Hoadley made a surprise, but very welcome, visit.

There were some great talks and panel sessions that were saturated with enthusiasm for music, music production and the industry in general, Peter Jenner (producer, manager for Pink Floyd and general music industry activist) was particularly entertaining.

The FAST IMPACt project hosted a panel session to share and discuss out work on future semantic audio tools and opportunities. I would very much like to thank the panelists – Gary Bromham, producer / engineer; George Fazekas, Centre 4 Digital Music, QMUL;  Matt White, Omnifone; Peter Tolmie, Mixed Reality Lab, UoN; and Jon Eades, Abbey Road Studios for their excellent contribution to that session…

…and finally Russ Hepworth-Sawyer and Rob Toulson for hosting a great conference and letting us at FAST share our work.