NAMM Expo 2023 - A Personal Reflection
This year’s NAMM was an absolute blast for Qosmo! The expo took place from April 13th — 15th this year and is the world’s biggest music technology trade show event. NAMM was an incredible opportunity to demonstrate Qosmo’s flagship AI music product, Neutone (https://neutone.space/), as well as promote Qosmo (https://www.qosmo.jp) as a brand and establish new business relationships. Qosmo were invited by GPU Audio, who offered us a space to host a booth as part of their Innovation Lounge. We were located in the North building of the Anaheim Exhibition Centre alongside many other music tech companies. The Innovation Lounge in particular was made up of several innovating music tech companies including Harmonai, MNTRA, Genelec, GPU Audio and Splice, many of which were demonstrating cutting-edge AI or immersive audio applications.
Attending NAMM for the first time, I found the event to be much larger in scale than what I had anticipated. However, to my amazement, I discovered that it was only a fraction of the size that it was in years prior to the pandemic: Approximately 50–60% of the attendance and area coverage of previous years according to conversations I had with attendees. NAMM seemed to be in a recovery state this year with expectations to hit or surpass its previous capacity by the next NAMM Expo in 2024. NAMM 2023 was also the return of a full in-person conference so it is understandable that its recovery will be gradual given many people had acclimatised to working remotely and attending events online.
On the first day, I represented Qosmo at a panel discussion on the topic of AI Music alongside many incredible industry experts from fellow Innovation Lounge companies. The title ‘Rise of the Machines: Surviving the AI Music Apocalypse’, albeit threatening sounding, peaked the interest of many attendees resulting in an incredible turn out for the Innovation Lounge opening event. I enjoyed sharing my experience on how we leverage AI as a creative tool at Qosmo and how we empower artists and push creative boundaries by harnessing cutting-edge developments in AI. Hopefully I was able to impart my excitement to others and reassured those who have been worrying about the technology being used to replace them.
The day only got better as we fired into a fantastic live performance from Nao Tokui and BIG YUKI in the afternoon. The performance was a great opportunity to demonstrate our Neutone tech being used in a live music scenario. It was important for us to showcase Neutone’s abilities and communicate this to an audience in order to secure more interest in our technology and the field of AI music tech as a whole. Ultimately, we were at NAMM to create a positive impact with our AI music tech given the growing speculation from musicians and artists over AI in recent times. We used the live performance as a way of demonstrating the sonic possibilities and creative potential of AI technology.
The performance went well and we found that it generated a lot of engagement and curiosity around Qosmo’s tech with many participants soon coming to our booth to try out Neutone for themselves. Over the next few days we also had the pleasure of having many people come to chat with us and try out our products. The reactions were always very positive when witnessing Neutone in action and after taking the time to understand some of the technical components powering our technology. Some attendees could not believe that Neutone was not playing back recorded audio samples and that it was synthesising such complex sounds in real-time. Synthesis is commonly associated with traditional digital synthesisers that produce simple wave shapes so Neutone’s Neural Audio Synthesis abilities frequently impressed and surprised those who came by our booth.
The second day allowed us some time to network and interact with other companies at NAMM. I found that a lot of the companies outside of the Innovation Lounge were oblivious to the rate of innovation that is going on in the AI space and how it will then impact the music industry. We had some interesting discussions with a few major music tech companies who are curious about AI and how it may be used as a tool to extend creativity. The companies we chatted to asked us what could be achieved using Neural Audio technologies that could not be achieved using traditional DSP. After explaining neural audio timbre transfer to the companies they came to our booth the following day to try out Neutone. Hopefully the experience with Neutone was inspiring for them and we will soon see more influential music tech companies adopt and invest in emerging AI technologies.
It was a highlight of ours to have so many highly influential music tech companies come visit our booth, many of which had stopped by to check out Neutone and our other products to get a grasp on how AI can extend creativity for their customers. We also demonstrated the NeuNote (TBC) prototype to them which we refer to as the MIDI equivalent of Neutone. Personally, I felt the companies who visited our booth were impressed by our tech’s capabilities and are excited to see how we develop it further. We hope that by nurturing relationships with such companies, they can help us improve the adoption of the Neutone platform and Neural Audio technologies as a whole.
On the final day of NAMM I did a presentation on our work and products at Qosmo. The presentation was a fantastic opportunity to promote Neutone and to inspire others on the potential of Neural Audio technologies to extend the creativity of artists and musicians. I also used it as a chance to promote the new AI model building service that we are currently offering to artists that are interested in exploring and contributing to the Neutone platform. We had a handful of curious participants sign up over the course of the expo and hopefully that will continue to grow as we promote the model training service. Although the presentation was enjoyable for me and a great opportunity to promote our work, the event started early on the Saturday after many afterparties ensued the previous night so unfortunately some were not able to attend. Maybe if the presentation was later in the day it would have had a larger audience so I will shoot for those time slots in future. Fortunately I gained greater insight into what makes an impactful presentation at NAMM: the presentation should be tailored for musicians and artists as they seem to respond to seeing how the products will benefit them and their workflows and less interested in the background and mission of the company who make the products. Too much technical detail was also ineffective in grabbing attention. For future consumer focused events I will emphasise the capabilities of our products and demonstrate them through more interactive live demos. The Splice team gave a good example of creating impact and left a strong impression on me and others through their tech demo-focused presentations which consistently grabbed the audience’s attention. Observing Splice’s performance has inspired me to apply similar techniques next time round!
To conclude, NAMM was an amazing opportunity to put Qosmo on the map of consumer music tech. We established many new business relationships as well as nurtured our current relationships amongst the innovators in music tech. Overall, Neutone was well received, yet much is still required in terms of functionality and features to be adopted by more musicians and artists. I feel musicians and artists currently see a lot of AI technology as experimental and exploratory rather than a serious tool for music production and music making so it is imperative for us to focus on developing invaluable features to break through to the professional musician market. A lot more time, focus and hard work is required to grow Neutone into something that is truly disruptive to the music tech industry as it exists currently. However, I also observed that NAMM seems to be slow in reacting to the latest innovations occurring in the AI space. AI has been a lot more disruptive in the visual and language domains but less so in music thus far. Hopefully we will see similar disruption hit the music industry over the next year, led by innovations like Neutone and other AI music tools as they evolve.
