Introduction of the Technologies That Make Up Project LYDIA - Taichi Kumon & Tom Baker

https://audio.dev/ -- @audiodevcon​ --- Introduction of the Technologies That Make Up Project LYDIA - Taichi Kumon & Tom Baker - ADC Japan 2026 --- While the headlines in musical AI are often dominated by ever-larger music generation models, a parallel trend runs in the opposite direction: shrinking architectures down until they're fast enough to run in real time, inside the tight latency budgets of live audio. This talk explores how compact, efficient architectures can be utilized as entirely novel creative tools. We'll briefly trace the path from early models to variational autoencoders (VAEs), focusing on their ability to learn very compressed representations of sound. These timbral latent spaces then become a palette within which you can smoothly interpolate, manipulate, and sample from, or exploit for creative effects such as timbre transfer. After a primer on the mechanics and theory behind these models, we will touch on the engineering reality of making these models playable: optimizing for streamable, low-latency inference, restructuring networks so they can process audio frame by frame, and porting trained models into C++. We'll then transition into the physical, looking at handling audio IO, codecs and MIDI on a combination of widely available consumer hardware, a Raspberry Pi 5, and Pico 2, so these models can be deployed in a self-contained unit you can actually pick up and play. --- Tom Baker Taichi Kumon --- 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/   / audiodevcon     / audiodevcon     / audiodevcon     / audiodevcon     / audiodevcon   https://mastodon.social/@audiodevcon --- Edited by Digital Medium Ltd: https://online.digital-medium.co.uk --- Organized and produced by JUCE: https://juce.com/ --- Special thanks to the ADC Team: Sophie Carus Derek Heimlich Andrew Kirk Bobby Lombardi Tom Poole Ralph Richbourg Jim Roper Jonathan Roper Prashant Mishra #adc #audiodev #dsp #audio #conferenceaudio #audioprocessing #audioproduction #audioprogramming #sound #music #musictech #soundtech #audiotech #audiotechnology