Is musical innovation still possible today? After centuries of pushing instruments and
compositional forms to their limits, so much of today’s music – in genres from popular to
contemporary classical – feels stuck, circling old, familiar ground. And now AI is flooding the world with derivative music, often highly polished, largely indistinguishable from what professional musicians create, but rarely sounding fresh (at least so far).

Amid this saturation, I believe one promising direction for innovation is meta-instruments: systems that allow us to shape music along new sonic dimensions. These often involve new or unusual kinds of controller interface, but most importantly they employ novel software-defined control modalities.

In this talk I will demonstrate and discuss some of my recent work in this area… 
- **The Rhythm Engine**: a kind of “rhythm synth”, designed both to replace and go far beyond conventional drum machines. To me, creating rhythms with today’s tools is akin to creating sounds by manually setting the level of every individual audio sample. We don’t do that - we use tools like synths which provide higher-level control, more musical, less fiddly, faster, more creative, more fun. The Rhythm Engine applies analogous principles to rhythm generation, for example by viewing rhythmic structures in terms of “rhythm frequency” alongside our conventional “time domain” perspective. Coded up mainly in C with a Max/MSP GUI, over the last 3 years this has evolved into a powerful polyrhythmic beast, capable of “rhythm morphing” and other novel transformations.

- **The Poikilophone family**: a set of instruments/meta-instruments I started work on in 2020 in the depths of COVID isolation. Acquiring several off-the-shelf MIDI controllers (a breath controller with accelerometers, ROLI Seaboard Blocks, Genki Wave, etc), I created software to “weave them together” into new performance systems, aiming for wide sonic/timbral range, nuanced expressivity, and intuitive playability without steep learning curves.

Pete’s professional life has revolved mainly around music, music technology, and
entrepreneurship. He spent ten years at University in Scotland, majoring in physics/maths and in music, culminating in a PhD in Electronic Music. His musical roots lie in Western classical music, from freelance professional horn playing to composition for classical ensembles. Later he was a founder member of rock bands - mostly writing/creating material in studios, occasionally setting caution (and woeful keyboard technique!) aside to play synths on stage.

As music technologist and entrepreneur, in 1986 Pete co-founded Zyklus Ltd to create the MIDI Performance System, a revolutionary interactive sequencer embraced by musicians including film composer Vangelis, now a niche collector’s item that’s being revived and recreated by a handful of enthusiasts in Europe. In 2001 he established and led muvee Technologies, a Singapore startup which pioneered automatic video editing software, shipping hundreds of millions of copies worldwide.

An alarmingly large portion of his life has been spent painstakingly fashioning electronic works in home studios. In recent years, that focus has shifted towards creating algorithmic music systems and meta-instruments including the Poikilophone and Rhythm Engine, developing software primarily in Max/MSP, Javascript and C.