The World’s First Artist-Forward Plug-in Company Focused on Ethically Trained AI Tools; A Conversation with BT and Lacy Transeau of Soundlabs

In a career that has spanned 30 years, Brian Transeau, simply known as BT, has worn many hats.

He’s produced some of the biggest & most iconic trance hits of all time, delved deep into IDM, been nominated for a Grammy, broke a record for the amount of vocal edits in a song, scored several blockbuster films, composed music for Shanghai Disneyland, and even collaborated with some of the biggest plug-in companies today to create plug-ins that help producers re-create some of his techniques.

And, somehow, with all of that under his belt, he’s once again traversing uncharted waters: he, along with Michael Hetrick, Joshua Dickinson, and his wife, Lacy Transeau, have created Soundlabs AI, the world’s first plug-in company focusing on making tools for music producers using ethnically sourced and trained artificial intelligence.  

I’ll go out and address the elephant in the room: AI is a scary term.

The world is plagued with far too much unethical AI that draws from the work of un-consenting creators, and I think everyone agrees that unethical AI is unacceptable. But, at the same time, I’ve been fascinated by the prospect of AI as a potential tool to aid musicians. If someone were to come out and make ethnically trained AI tools for use in the production process, it would change the music production game for the better. We’ve already seen the early steps with machine learning in a lot of current plugins; oeksound’s Soothe2 and Bloom come to mind. So does iZotope’s Ozone Assistant. Soundlabs, though, is taking the next step, and opening up incredible possibilities for producers around the world.

I recently had a chance to speak with BT and Lacy about their experience in creating a music production company, as well as the release of their very first plugin: MicDrop.

The Beginning

While known mostly as a producer, BT has always been intrigued by the prospect of plug-in creation. “I’ve had a fundamental interest in making tools to make music, not just the music itself,” he said, “because I’ve come up with all these crazy ideas throughout the years where I say, ‘hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I could do this?’ and then I start looking around for a tool to do that with, and it doesn’t exist.”

In his career, BT has collaborated with companies like iZotope and Cableguys to create “different kinds of tools, all with a goal to make a new sort of sound or a new fundamental technique that feels inspiring,” he said. “And in the case of the stuff that I make, it’s because I needed it first and then hopefully it’s something that other people need as well.”

BT’s interest in AI started three years ago, when he was approached by a major company and asked if they could train a model on his music. 

“And I said, ‘well, that’s interesting. Do you mean for, like, research purposes, or prototypes, what are you guys thinking?’ And they’re like, ‘yeah, well, no, to release.’ And I said, ‘okay, well, so what would that look like to you guys?’ And they’re like, ‘well, we would train on it.’”

According to both him and Lacy, this was a real “light bulb” moment; there was something going on in the music industry that they needed to pay attention to.

“We started talking amongst ourselves, saying ‘I think we need to make AI tools for musicians, because things are being made in the background now that are really going to dictate how music is made,’” said Lacy, “and if artists aren’t involved in that conversation, these things get decided for musicians. So that was really why we wanted to even start Soundlabs; to make tools that use AI in the workflow creation process, and also to try and get musicians excited about different uses for AI. It’s not going away. So, I think trying to get more artists excited about it and seeing how you can work with it is important. It can open a lot of creative doors for you.”

The Birth of Soundlabs & MicDrop

Soundlabs entered the public eye with MicDrop, a game-changing plugin that can take any voice and transform it into another voice – all with a DAW. That is a gross oversimplification of what the plugin is capable of; you can take your (or any) voice and turn it into a professional singer’s voice, or a trumpet, or a talkbox, or a children’s choir, or any other voice or sound that they’ve included as a “model” in the plug-in. I’ll be doing a full-on review of it in the near future, but I’ll just say this: I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.

BT, Lacy, and the rest of the team were working on several different plug-ins at once, but MicDrop crossed the finish line first. Each of these plugins they were working on, according to BT, are “human tools” that use real material from people close to the MicDrop team.

“All the voices are from friends, family, open source material, or sanctioned topline singers. Each of the models in MicDrop is a composite of, like, up to 50 different singers. All of those are with consent. We wanted to make something that allowed you to sing in different voices, to do crazy sound design stuff.”

When it came to MicDrop, there were a lot of hurdles to jump over.

“MicDrop was an unusually large project; it’s the longest we’ve worked on something consecutively,” said Lacy. “MicDrop and Soundlabs related stuff are the first things where we’ve really said ‘okay, we’re waking up and we’re doing this every day for, like, a solid year and a half.’ Everything else hit the back burner.” 

The team consists of only four people, and they would wake up every day ready to work on the plugin. Soon, they found out that they also had to deal with the necessary evils of setting up everything for a company to function.

“We had never thought about things like an authorization system,” said BT, “which, quite literally, was a five-month, massive project to make a login system from scratch.” “We needed terms and conditions, we needed a bank account,” echoed Lacy. “We needed all of these things that go into making a business, because we’ve made software, but we’ve never released it ourselves.”

Pushing the Limits of Technology

While creating their first few plugins, the team ran into some problems during the development process that they only ran into for one main reason: they were the first company to use specific aspects of Apple’s silicon chips, as they were designing the plugin on them. And, in their quest to push those chips to the limit, they’ve actually found some problems within Apple’s software that needed fixing.

BT recounted a story about how he became connected with the head of Logic Audio, and the team’s disbelief when they began exchanging emails with Apple’s developers about issues that they had found, solely because they were the first people to do anything to find them. “Mike and Josh were like, ‘how the hell are we basically talking with the Illuminati?’”

“The reason I bring this up, though,” he continued, “is because we’ve done something that, on an Apple system level, needs to be patched. They know about it and they’re going to patch it. We had to use all three processors (M1, M2, and M3) in order to make something that is this crazy work.”

Long story short, this program requires a ton of CPU and GPU power, and that’s because they’ve really pushed this tech to the limit by using the Apple GPU’s neural chips. “And the cool thing is that other people are going to do it,” said BT. “Not necessarily with this exact sort of tool, but they’re going to do processes that use the neural chips in the GPU because these Macs are so powerful now, so Apple needs to fix this for other development teams because people will come up with wild ideas.”

Lacy continued on about the intricacies of the technology, and why it has to be so intense on the CPU. “There are services online that do similar things to MicDrop. We don’t think they sound as good. They’re also not good for your workflow. You like to have to leave the DAW and usually have to buy credits, you go and you upload and then you wait for processing time, you download it, and then you go back into your DAW, see what it’s like. It’s not very conducive for kind of staying in flow. We really wanted this to run locally on your machine and not have to go to a cloud, so it was like a really big ask for even what’s technically possible.”

“In theory, this shouldn’t be possible locally,” said BT, “but it’s just really pushing the limits. And the great news is that each six months, each year that passes, [the plugin] is just going to get smoother and smoother. People’s machines are just getting more and more powerful, which is really cool.”

The Sky’s The Limit

The team have been blown away by what producers around them have been able to accomplish by using MicDrop. BT brought up an instance where Thys, best known as a member of NOISIA, was using the plugin with a live microphone (which, admittedly, isn’t what you’re supposed to do) and feeding it into a speaker. For those familiar with Alvin Lucier’s 1969 musique concrète composition “I am sitting in a room,” consider this the 21st century version of it. 

“It just started making what sounded like alien vocal chops,” BT said. “It’s like the craziest sound design thing, having it feed back through itself. It just starts saying words. You can switch models in the middle of it and one model will sing into the next model. It’s crazy.” 

Thys’ musique-concrète-style usage was just one instance of a ridiculous way to use MicDrop. Bass music legend Au5 did something that only Au5 would do, according to BT. “He did a band split bass thing where he split out the sub and then he took the midbass and ran it through MicDrop. He then played with the EQ and the EQ changed the mouth shape of the model. It’s the most intense bass I’ve ever heard.”

These are just two extremely creative ways that professional producers have used this technology as tools in their own music, and BT is thrilled. “It’s so cool seeing people find these wild uses for sound design. I love it.”

What’s Next?

There’s a lot to be excited about on the horizon for Soundlabs.

BT and Lacy have promised some new models coming soon for MicDrop, including some more brass instruments and a melodic techno focused vocal pack, but their next plug-in is coming sooner than you’d expect.

“We’ll ship at least one plug in between now and the next six months, but we definitely may ship two,” said BT. “We’re very close on two plugins, and they’re both just wild and just fun and exciting. They do things you can’t already do or are really hard to do and it’s a fun new way to do it.”

They were tight-lipped about any further details, but I’m sure that whatever these plugins can do will blow minds in ways that I once thought was impossible. 

Conclusion

Soundlabs is far more than a company. It is the single brightest light today when it comes to the ethical usage of AI tools in music production. It is a symbol of what is possible if you push the limits of technology for the benefit of musicians all over the world. It is a sign that maybe, if used in the right way, AI really doesn’t have to be that scary.

Throughout our entire conversation, both BT and Lacy were visibly excited for what the future holds. And it’s hard not to be.