To answer the question of “what do we do?”, and especially “why do we do what we do?”, we actually have to get deep a bit. Because during the course of the last 20 years or so, especially advancements in audio production software were rare to be seen. Yes, computers have become unbelievable powerful and hard disks have become bigger, but do we actually profit from these performance gains? Especially in software development for audio production, only the paradigms of the analog studio world have been copied. Up until now, most audio software only resembles mixing desks, tape machines or effect units. These all are now condensed in what we call the “Digital Audio Workstation”. Especially the shiny and photorealistic user interfaces of modern audio plug-ins carried this copying progress to extremes. Yes, they may sound very close to their analog counterparts, but they are nearly useless to work with on a computer screen, if you have nothing but a mouse sitting on your desk. And even if you own a hardware controller, things are far from being perfect. I just does not “feel” good.

And further, even our CD collection is still just a CD collection, now only replaced by files and folders on our hard disks. And in the meantime, we have “collected” so many of them that for some of us, our life span is not sufficient anymore to ever listen again to just a portion of them. But still, when we are looking for a specific audio file, we stick to the descriptions on the back of the CD-cases; by now only they are called meta-tags. This method works well up to a certain extent, namely as long as we still can find words to describe what we are looking for. Song titles work fine, artist names do as well. But what about sound effects? “Pfffrt-hiooo-bioong”. I bet you pretty quickly run out of results when typing this into your iTunes search field.

So, would we by now actually not expect a drastically different methods of user interaction, now that we have all these powerful machines? But as the views of the software developers are often limited, audio software still remains in an analog stone age. Even today, there is not enough communication between the developers and the actual users of audio software. Real innovation in audio software development never took place; all software has simply copied the analog role models of the traditional studio world.

However, we claim now that we have moved off this beaten tracks. Our actual innovation hereby lies in the understanding of the computer as a whole. Because: In every illustration we see, a computer is only depicted by an image of a screen. That, however, not without a good reason! Because if we ask someone to draw a computer for us, he would definitely come up with a drawing of a computer screen. This deeply rooted reduction of computers to just their screens has led to that all software only presents us audio search results visually; a momentous discontinuity.

While looking for solutions to the problems that come when searching for sounds, we had come to the insight that if we want to be innovative, we first have to completely overthrow the old-fashioned interaction paradigms with audio software.

With this understanding, we now have developed novel and completely unconventional user interfaces that for the first time ever allow an efficient retrieval of audio files. Therefore, we have asked hundreds of musicians and sound designers about their mind models in the creation of sounds, and consistently converted the findings into software, which we call CASE - Computer Aided Sound Exploration.

One of our tools, SonoSketch, for the first time enables a tonal definition of audio search queries with a simple paint-box of elementary sounds. Another tool, SoundTorch utilizes our sense of hearing with its possibility of spatial auditory perception in the “screening” of audio files; an important step away from the visual represantation.

SonoSketch and SoundTorch let a computer flex its muscles; We leverage all capacities of modern graphic cards and multi-core machines to - well - solve a problem that we actually would not have without the computer. But aren’t we all doing this?