Roth Michaels

Director of Software Research

inMusic

About Me

Roth Michaels is Director of Software Research at inMusic, the family of music technology and consumer electronics brands behind Akai Professional, Moog Music, M-Audio, Denon DJ, and Native Instruments, among others. He stepped into this role following inMusic's 2026 acquisition of Native Instruments, taking on responsibility for the AI/ML research team, leading adoption and training of internal AI tools across the organization, and coordinating software engineering topics that cross brand lines.

Before the acquisition, Roth was a Principal Software Engineer at Native Instruments, where he worked on software architecture to bring together the company's merged engineering organizations and legacy codebases — spanning Native Instruments, iZotope, and Brainworx during the years those brands operated under one roof. He also supported the Audio Research team, helping accelerate the path from research to productization and building fast prototyping tools for product teams. Earlier, as the lead library designer at iZotope, Roth built a new internal cross-platform library, "Glass," part of which is now available as open source. In his prior role as Mix/Master Software Architect, he led development of the reference implementation that moved iZotope's products to subscription and headed the team that launched the company's first SaaS offering for music producers.

Roth studied music composition at Brandeis University and continued his studies in the Dartmouth Digital Musics program. He began his career writing software for his own compositions and for the works of other composers and artists, and teaching MaxMSP to composers and musicians through both private instruction and university course design. Before joining iZotope, he worked as a consultant for small startups building mobile applications specializing in location services and Bluetooth.

Sessions

  • What Is Timbre?
    14:00 - 14:50 UTC | Tuesday 10th November 2026 | Bristol 3
    Beginner
    Intermediate
    Advanced

    Play the same note on a violin, a flute, and your own voice and anyone can tell them apart instantly—yet the standard definition of timbre is a confession of defeat: it's *whatever is left over* once you've accounted for pitch and loudness. So what is actually left over? And why does your ear hear one oboe in a full orchestra, three strings as a single chord, and—if you detune one string slightly—those same strings as three separate sounds? We'll chase that question from the inside of one sound out to a room full of competing ones. Starting with perception, we'll […]

  • Using Strongly-Typed Units in Digital Audio Software
    14:00 - 14:50 UTC | Wednesday 12th November 2025 | Conservatory
    Intermediate
    Advanced

    API or math mistakes with units can cause problems ranging from a digital audio processing outputting silence to crashing your Mars rover—we’ll discuss real-life examples of both! There are efforts to solve these problems in the C++ standard library and open-source libraries that can be used today by audio developers. The combination of user-defined types, conversion operators/constructors, and operator overloading in C++ give us the tools to use strong-types and avoid unit mistakes; std::chrono is a great example of this that everyone should be using. Unfortunately, when dealing with units beyond time many developers still use primitive types encoding units […]

  • Learning While Building

    MVPs, Prototypes, and the Importance of Physical Gesture
    10:00 - 10:50 UTC | Tuesday 12th November 2024 | Bristol 1
    Beginner
    Intermediate
    Advanced

    The “build, measure, learn” loop and the importance of iterating on “working software” brought to us by the eXtreme Programming (XP) and Agile Software Development movements is now an essential part of 21st century software development. The ability to iterate, learn, and pivot becomes even more valuable in fast moving industries like digital audio. We can increase our pace of learning and iteration by not only embracing these techniques from XP and Agile by bringing the learning process earlier before you begin to write “working software.” Will people even want what I’m building? A discussion of Lean Software Development will […]