Doodads & Doohickeys - A Guide to Theory-Crafting & Modelling a Fictional Acoustic Instrument - Syl Morrison - ADC 2025
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Physical modelling is a theory-dense and complex area of plugin design, which tries its utmost to remain faithful to the real-world mechanics of the modelled instrument. But what if that instrument doesn't exist?
This talk aims to explore this concept, prioritising a ""this sounds fun"" approach, rather than a ""this is accurate and actually real maths"" approach, in a hand-wavy, conversational and engaging way. Its purpose is less to give practical modelling advice, and more to encourage experimentation, and to celebrate the art of exploring bizarre-fever-dream plugin ideas.
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A self-taught audio software developer fascinated by eldritch, abstract and unconventional effects, based in Dublin, Ireland.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Reshaping the Voice - Real-Time Neural Audio Effect - Anders Bargum - ADCx Copenhagen 2026
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In this presentation, Anders Bargum introduces Reshaping the Voice, a real-time neural audio effect designed for voice conversion and speech modification. Voice conversion involves altering a speaker's vocal identity while keeping the underlying words and linguistic content intact. While state-of-the-art voice generation models achieve highly realistic results, they are heavily constrained by high parameter counts, non-causal processing, and high latency, making them unusable for live applications such as digital audio workstations (DAWs) or interactive virtual environments.
To overcome these limitations, the project combines speech representation learning with musical timbre transfer. By utilizing feature disentanglement, the model disassembles input audio into independent streams representing vocal identity (timbre), linguistics (phonetic units), loudness, and pitch. These features can then be individually manipulated, enabling real-time identity swapping, pitch shifting, and even the generation of multi-part vocal choirs from a single monophonic input.
The technical implementation leverages a streamable pipeline trained in PyTorch and exported via TorchScript to run efficiently inside a C++ framework hosted by JUCE. By implementing causal convolutions and state caching rather than relying on future-sample lookaheads, the system achieves incredibly low latency. Anders demonstrates practical deployment of this technology, showcasing a fully functioning VST plugin and an integration within the Unity game engine for designing real-time voices for 3D avatars in virtual reality.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Testing is a massively important part of releasing high quality software, and it is often overlooked when starting a project. Retro-fitting testing onto an existing project can be hard, leading to either a labour intensive process, or more frequently, lower software quality.
This talk discusses practical, pragmatic approaches to building software that makes testing easier. It will discuss this in the context of the Cmajor project, showing the approaches used to ensure that new features can be tested quickly, and reducing the risk of regressions.
The talk will focus on the challenges facing audio software developers, specifically hard realtime audio contexts.
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Cesare is a developer with over 25 years experience of realtime software development. He has worked in audio since 2001 and is the co-designer of the Cmajor programming language.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Cross-Platform Framework for Textural Granular Processing - Aman Jagwani & Victor Lazzarini - ADCx Copenhagen 2026
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This talk presents a cross-platform C++ framework for real-time textural time-domain and spectral granular processing called Granular Recipes.
Granular synthesis is a well-explored area of audio DSP that exposes a large number of parameters to users, such as density, pitch, grain size, position, and jitter, resulting in a wide range of sonic possibilities from dense clouds to rhythmic stutters. While this breadth is what makes granular synthesis so powerful, the abundance of parameters and possible sonic outcomes can also lead to a loss of focus or an overwhelming decision-making process, especially during live performance.
Our framework proposes a different approach to granular program development and performance. Instead of exposing raw parameters, we introduce a system of “recipes” or behavioral structures that developers write to define how granular parameters relate to each other and evolve over time. A recipe functions like a developer-level preset that provides a single sonic identity to the resulting granular synthesis, such as pitch-shifting micro-loops, sparse textural bursts, dense clouds, or tempo-synced stutters. This approach allows the developer to constrain or choreograph the parameter space, embedding a sense of compositional intent directly into the programming process.
Once a recipe is active, the performer controls the evolution of texture through just two macros: energy and intensity. Modulating these macros animates the sound while remaining within the sonic signature defined by the recipe. The use of only two macros also makes the resulting instrument particularly conducive to gestural and sensor-based control, since only two mappings, and therefore only two sensors, are required to produce comprehensive transformations of the sound.
In the talk, we present the framework’s layered architecture, consisting of a platform-agnostic core DSP engine, the recipe API, and thin platform bindings that allow the same C++ recipe code to run on desktop, microcontroller, and FPGA targets. On FPGAs, the grain engine runs as custom IP modules in the programmable logic, enabling ultra-low latency and high parallelism, while the recipe system runs on the ARM processing system. By leveraging the throughput and parallelism offered by the FPGA, we have also implemented spectral granular processing, which can interact with the same recipe API, extending the system into the frequency domain within this embedded environment.
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Aman Jagwani
Aman Jagwani, from Mumbai, India, is an audio programmer, musician, and researcher. He completed his Bachelor's degree in Electronic Production and Design and Drum-set Performance at Berklee College of Music, Boston, and later earned a Master of Science in Sound and Music Computing from Maynooth University.
Currently, Aman is undertaking his Ph.D. at Maynooth University with supervisor, Prof. Victor Lazzarini, for which he received the Hume Fellow Scholarship Award. His research centres on audio DSP, embedded systems, FPGAs and interactive musical experience design.
Victor Lazzarini
Victor Lazzarini is a Professor of Music at Maynooth University. A BMus graduate of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil, he received his AMusD from the University of Nottingham, UK. His academic interests include musical signal processing and sound synthesis; computer music languages; electroacoustic and instrumental composition, and improvisation. He has authored over one hundred fifty peer-reviewed publications in his various specialist research areas. He is the author of Aulib and Aurora, two object-oriented libraries for audio signal processing, and is one of the project leaders for the Csound sound and music programming system.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Modern Feedback Delay Networks for Realistic and Creative Reverberation - Gloria Dal Santo - ADC 2025
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The Feedback Delay Network (FDN), originally proposed over 50 years ago, remains one of the most widely used structures for real-time artificial reverberation. An FDN consists of a set of delay lines combined with attenuation filters, interconnected through a feedback matrix. This topology simulates the recursive process of sound waves reflecting within an acoustic space. FDNs are computationally efficient, highly parametrizable, and provide a flexible framework for exploring a wide range of delay-based reverberation designs.
Recent research has focused on improving the efficiency and perceptual quality of FDNs to produce more realistic reverberation, particularly for spatial audio applications requiring multichannel systems. This talk will present an overview of the state of the art in FDN design, current research directions, and best practices for the challenging task of parameter design and tuning.
One of the most notable recent advancements includes the use of gradient descent optimization schemes to improve the smoothness and spectral coloration of FDNs, enabling a reduction in computational cost. Moreover, sparse filter-based feedback matrix design and grouped FDN topologies allow for modeling more complex acoustic scenes.
In addition to these technical developments, the talk will also explore how FDNs can be used for artistic applications, such as creating reverberation with intentionally unnatural characteristics, including time-varying behavior, shimmering effects, and reverb enhancement systems.
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Gloria Dal Santo received the M.Sc. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2022. During her studies, she focused on the modeling and cancellation of acoustic echo. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at the Acoustics Lab, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland. Her research interests include artificial reverberation, spatial audio, and audio applications of machine learning. In her free time, she is involved with the Entropy DJ collective and is exploring live music coding through the Algorave community.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Optimizing UI Rendering Performance in Cubase and Nuendo - Erich Krey - ADC 2025
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In this talk, I’d like to take you on a journey through how we significantly improved UI rendering performance in Cubase and Nuendo on macOS by integrating Apple’s Metal technology into our framework.
While I’ll provide some high-level insights into how UI rendering works in Cubase and Nuendo (Steinberg DAW), the main focus of my talk is the journey itself.
We’ll start at the point where we realized that our existing implementation no longer performed adequately on modern Macs, and follow the path through what we achieved, the key challenges we faced, and how we overcame them.
Hopefully, many of the concepts and solutions I present will be broadly applicable.
So—does all’s well that ends well?
Well, not quite. I’ll conclude by highlighting one key issue that still remains—an issue relevant to all of us developing DAWs or plug-ins.
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Erich Krey
I’m an Application Performance Manager at Steinberg, where I’ve been working since 2013.
I’m passionate about all things related to performance. The first computer I ever used was a Macintosh Performa 630.
I work in a hybrid role—continuing to develop for Cubase and Nuendo while also collaborating with various teams at Steinberg and external partners. Together, we analyze performance issues, propose solutions, and plan the necessary fixes.
During my studies, I worked as a piano player in restaurants and produced an album with a friend. I still enjoy composing piano tracks to this day.
If you’re interested in chatting about performance, Cubase, Nuendo, or anything else, feel free to reach out!
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
In this talk from ADCx Copenhagen 2026, electronic musician, composer, and audio programmer Cristián Vogel introduces Incline, a native desktop instrument developed at his studio, Never Engine Labs. Moving beyond traditional time-ordered slicing and blind segmentation found in many granular synthesis tools, Incline treats the act of segmentation as the primary musical decision, putting compositional control back into the hands of the creator.
The core of Incline lies in its multi-dimensional analysis stage, where spectral data functions as the absolute source of truth. By processing fixed stereo files through a principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm, the software maps audio fragments onto a non-linear, navigable "topersonic" terrain based on spectral similarity rather than a chronological timeline. Vogel demonstrates how composers can perform these sounds by navigating the 2D surface manually, via MIDI, or through a built-in contour sequencer, offering three distinctive runtime behaviors—one-shot, one-loop, and multi-layer cloud modes—that allow similar spectral clusters to be recontextualized musically.
Vogel also shares the underlying development story, highlighting how modern frameworks like Rust, Fun DSP, Tauri, and the FluCoMa library from the University of Huddersfield made the software possible. Reflecting on the evolving landscape of software production, he explores the rising significance of AI-assisted development ("vibe coding"), which enables contemporary artist-engineers to bridge the gap between creative ambition and complex digital signal processing to bring entirely new instruments to life.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
How To Distribute Your Plugins - Using MuseHub as the Engine To Get Your Audio Tools in the Hands of Millions - Khaled Said - ADC 2025
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Creating a plugin is a momentous step, but without a distribution platform with a wide reach, it is a hard job to gain visibility. This talk will introduce you to MuseHub, the creator tools publishing platform by Muse Group. We will cover how MuseHub can help you efficiently distribute your products, expose it to the wide audience Muse Group reaches through its iconic brands such as Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, Hal Leonard and Audacity and how to use the platform to manage and optimize your business.
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Khaled Said has over a decade of experience in the music tech industry working with brands such as LANDR, PremiumBeat and now Muse Group. “As a creator myself it’s been a dear mission of mine providing tools that helps inspire creators to start and finish work”.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Building an Optimized DSP Framework in Modern C++ - Scott Carver - ADC 2025
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The introduction of C++23 and upcoming C++26 features have significantly expanded the potential for building expressive, manageable embedded domain-specific languages (EDSLs) that compile efficiently into optimized lower-level representations. Features like enhanced constexpr and consteval execution enable a single, descriptive and clear representation of audio DSP algorithms to generate multiple optimized versions tailored to specific execution contexts and runtime constraints.
Inspired by successful libraries such as Halide and Eigen, we will look at a prototype C++ library developed to explore clean separation between algorithm description, data structures, and execution strategies. It generalizes inner-loop optimizations vectorized across two dimensions, enabling consistent application of advanced optimization techniques across diverse DSP algorithms. The library provides us a collection of design patterns that we can use to formulate how a contemporary C++23/26 audio graph can be built.
This talk will explore practical techniques and simple examples for implementing these design patterns in modern C++, demonstrating how they collectively form a robust framework for defining and executing efficient DSP algorithms:
- Zero-cost Compile-time / Runtime Variant Values: Approaches to building scalar compile-time-constant and runtime-variant values, as well as more complex aggregate / property tree data structures, without incurring memory or performance penalties.
- Parametric Data Structures: Designing simple, readable data structures that can be optimized cache friendly access and vectorization.
- Expression Templates: Using C++'s template metaprogramming to defer computation, enabling optimized evaluation and graph transformations.
- Loop and Data Optimizations: Techniques for loop-invariant value hoisting, re-blocking, and linearization to improve memory and execution efficiency.
- Finite Difference Optimization: Automated optimizations for polynomials, trigonometric functions, and interpolation routines to minimize runtime computation.
- Unified Parallelism Models: Integrating voice-parallel and time-parallel computations within a single descriptive graph representation.
- Compile-time Graph Transformations: Leveraging constexpr to construct and optimize directed graphs representing DSP signal flows, including handling feedback loops and delays.
- Benchmarking Execution Strategies: Describing, benchmarking, and comparing graph execution strategies (time-parallel, voice-parallel, block-based), enabling parametric, empirical optimization decisions.
- Empirical Validation: Investigating whether and how these techniques improve DSP performance in realistic scenarios, with comparisons against established commercial and OS audio engines.
By applying these strategies, we demonstrate how a single algorithmic representation can flexibly handle multiple DSP use-cases—from polynomial interpolation and envelope generation to buffer read/write operations—significantly reducing redundant code and enabling focused optimization.
Furthermore, separating algorithm logic from execution strategies allows parameterizing benchmarks and optimizations based on CPU architecture and usage patterns, preserving algorithm clarity without embedding machine-specific details.
These strategies will be presented individually so they can be applied immediately in existing audio code-bases, and demonstrated within a unified framework context to highlight potential improvements in code clarity, performance, maintainability, testing, and benchmarking. Topics will be accessible for moderate-to-advanced C++ programmers, and anyone interested in exploring cutting-edge practices in modern audio DSP programming. Attendees will gain actionable insights, directly applicable techniques, and inspiration for advancing audio DSP code performance and clarity with modern C++.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
Commercialising Audio Plugins - Going From Development to Sales and Beyond - Tobias Lønnerød Madsen - ADC 2025
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Going from development to the first sale and beyond is a daunting journey, but we're here to share all the experience we have in the process. We'll dive into each decision you have to make along the way, in everything from distribution channels to marketing strategies, setting you up for success. The strategies we'll share are techniques we've seen work across multiple brands, some of which we can automate away entirely.
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Tobias Lønnerød Madsen
Tobias has been a freelancer supporting audio companies to grow and scale their business for many years, with a focus on smart e-commerce and marketing tools. He then took all the best strategies and techniques, and founded Moonbase.sh, an e-commerce platform honed for selling plugins direct to consumers. While he's not hacking away on new features for Moonbase, Tobias can be found on a motorcycle around in Europe, or playing some board games in Amsterdam.
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ADC is an annual event celebrating all audio development technologies, from music applications and game audio to audio processing and embedded systems. ADC’s mission is to help attendees acquire and develop new audio development skills, and build a network that will support their audio developer career.
Annual ADC Conference - https://audio.dev/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/audiodevcon
