Again, we’re back from an AES conference and an exciting weekend in London.

We had organized a workshop named “Bounce to App”, following results from our last years workshop in San Francisco “Rethinking the Digital Audio Workstation”. The general outcome of the lively and also entertaining discussion was that the boundaries between playing computer games and listening to music are vanishing at a rapid speed, although the music industries, especially labels and publishers struggle to follow.

Our panelists are among the few that have paved this path in the recent years, and shared interesting insights and anecdotes into the interactive music business.

(From left to right) Martin MacMillan, CEO of Bounce Mobile, the creator of the mobile music remix application Fireplayer shared his insights into negotiations with labels, artists and publishers when it comes to the question: “Hey, that’s a nice song you have there. We would like to let our customers remix that and share it with their friends through facebook. Is that allright?” (Hint: “Well, no problem, good Sir” was not the first answer he heard). Since more than a year, however, he was asking this very question to probably quite a few people, and quite a lot actually did agree to let the listener remix their songs.

Martin Roth, CTO of RjDj, the creator of “not apps, but sonic experiences” – according to their website – and the popular Inception App shared expert knowledge on the technical backgrounds in terms of audio processing power (and the lack thereof) and sensory capabilities of todays ubiquitous mobile devices.

Jörn Loviscach, our trusted panelists in all things scientific research looked deeply into the “Desiderata for Music App Authoring Software”. Because as already the title of the workshop suggested, there is no direct publishing path from the current music production tools into a (mobile) application. He looked into the authoring tools of the desktop publishing and the game industries, which have already started to implement the “Make an App from this” – button, and emphasized the specifics and requirements of a still to-be-built easy to use authoring software for interactive applications.

Not atypical for London, the panel discussion was prepared and carried on in the typical locations.