Category Programme announcements

On 15 July, 2025, The Creative Audio Synthesis and Interfaces Workshop was held at Queen Mary University of London, organised by AIM COMMA Lab members Jordie Shier, Haokun Tian, and Charalampos Saitis, and supported by the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence and Music (AIM) at the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM).

This one-day workshop included a series of talks exploring the intersection of creative audio synthesis and AI-enabled synthesizer programming.
Topics included evolutionary algorithms for sound exploration, synthesizer sound matching, timbre transfer, timbre-based control, reinforcement learning, differentiable digital signal processing, representation learning, and human-machine co-creativity.

Earlier this year, the AIM CDT visited the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion at the University of Oslo in Norway.
A shared interest in creative applications of audio synthesis and novel interface designs was established during this visit, motivating this follow-up workshop at QMUL.
Researchers from RITMO, The Open University, and the AIM CDT at QMUL were invited to
share their work, engage in critical discussion, and map directions for
future work. See below for a summary of talks with links to presentation recordings.

An evening concert showcased musical applications of technical implementations discussed during the workshop, grounding these discussions in real-world artistic contexts.

Invited Talks

Designing Percussive Timbre Remappings: Negotiating Audio Representations and Evolving Parameter Spaces

• Jordie Shier — Queen Mary University of London
• Presentation Recording

Facilitating serendipitous sound discoveries with simulations of open-ended evolution

• Björn Thor Jónsson — University of Oslo
• Presentation Recording

Autonomous control of synthesis parameters with listening-based reinforcement learning

• Vincenzo Madaghiele — University of Oslo
• Presentation Recording

Can a Sound Matching Model Produce Audio Embeddings that Align with Timbre Similarity Rated by Humans?

• Haokun Tian — Queen Mary University of London
• Presentation Recording

GuitarFlow: Realistic Electric Guitar Synthesis From Tablatures via Flow Matching and Style Transfer

• Jackson Loth — Queen Mary University of London

Timbre latent space transformations for interactive musical systems oriented to timbral music-making

• Andrea Bolzoni — The Open University
• Presentation Recording

Why Synthesizer Parameter Estimation Is Hard and How to Make it Easy

• Ben Hayes — Queen Mary University of London
• Presentation Recording

Perceptually Aligned Deep Image Sonification

• Balint Laczko — University of Oslo
• Presentation Recording

Modulation Discovery with Differentiable Digital Signal Processing

• Christopher Mitcheltree — Queen Mary University of London
• Presentation Recording

Musical Performances and Demos

Experience Replay (Performance)

• Vincenzo Madaghiele — University of Oslo

Weaving (Performance)

• Balint Laczko — University of Oslo

Phylogeny (Demo)

• Björn Thor Jónsson — University of Oslo