Thomas Walther

Startups

My new company is called Tape It. If you make music and record ideas on your phone, you should get the app. It’s a simple recording app with useful features for musicians that doesn’t try to be studio software. Lots of amateur and professional musicians are using and loving it.

My previous company was Sonalytic. Our team invented a new audio identification technology that could find individual song elements, such as a part of a bass line, in a large corpus of millions of songs. This proved useful for organising large music catalogues, from identifying remixes and mashups to protecting platforms from infringing content. I led Sonalytic as CTO until its acquisition by Spotify in 2017.

I had two startup attempts before Sonalytic, one around monitoring music in clubs and on festivals, and one around building a simple and intuitive AI-assisted music making app. While ideas and tech were exciting, the founding teams were not set up for success. Thankfully I found great mentors along the way, and it is thanks to them that my third attempt succeeded. Now I return the favour by regularly advising early-stage startups and new founders on how to create a strong and lasting team when building a company.

AI Research

I am actively researching ways to simplify music production. Today’s music recording tools were tailored for recording engineers, and they are hard to use by regular musicians. This significantly limits the number of musicians who can capture their creativity today.

If you are researching on how to use recent developments in AI to enable new designs for music recording and production tools, please reach out - I’d love to hear from you and discuss thoughts.

Music

In what almost feels like a previous life I used to sing and play in an indie rock band called Mama Jokes. I used to sing classical and opera music, too, both in choirs and solo.