Sofilab - Interactive Sound Design

Classification flattens, description holds detail. ran well-known tracks past the market-leading taggers, and the results show the cost of the closed list: a Yoruba Afrobeat track read as Latin, a fado read as Klezmer. The CORPUS pipeline describes instead of filing.

Carousel below.

The CORPUS contribution app went public today. For years at Sofilab we kept hitting the same wall: the generative models worth putting into real products need training data with clean provenance, and that data did not exist to buy. CORPUS is the infrastructure we are building so that it does, and the app is where musicians start contributing to it on their own terms.

Link below.

Most upload platforms take your music the instant you drop it in. Ingested, indexed, put to use, often before you have finished reading the terms.

The CORPUS contribution app opens the other way around. As a visitor you can upload anything, a rough mix, a record you love, a track you are unsure about, and none of it enters the corpus. What comes back is how our engine reads the music: a deep, written description, the genres it actually serves, the contexts where it would belong.

The app is public today. No invite, no waitlist. After a long run of "almost there," the project is open to anyone who wants in. You can walk in as a visitor and look around with nothing at stake, or step further and contribute.

If you contribute, you are joining a phase where the things still left to settle get settled with the people who joined in the room: the commercial license, the rules of contributor ownership, how scoring works, the questions we have not answered yet. The public beta runs under a provisional license that grants us no commercial rights, on purpose: this is the phase to work the structure out together, before any commercial use. Your music enters a commercially usable training set later, only if you agree to that step.

This is what we have been building toward. From here on it is yours to use, and yours to shape.

Go in. Upload something. Tell us where the description is wrong, and where the project itself is wrong.

Link in the first comment.

Sound on.

When HARMAN Automotive asked us to design sounds for AutoOne, the brief was contained: demo music plus start-up and shut-down sounds for HarmanKardon, for the CES stand, mixed and rendered in Dolby Atmos. By the time Jörg Hüttner and Mathis Nitschke delivered, the project had grown into something larger.

A start-up sound is the first impression a system makes. So before any sound was designed, we started with the brand. What does Harman Kardon actually stand for, sonically? What's the DNA that should run through every touchpoint?

​The answers shaped every individual sound and became an impulse for a broader conversation about the brand's sonic identity.

​What started as a sound design brief evolved into a redefinition of how Harman Kardon presents itself inside a vehicle.

Presented at CES 2025.

Thank you Sabrina Ceylan, Tanaponn Kulsedzeranee, Philipp Siebourg and team for the trust and the creative collaboration.

A soundwalk that works anywhere in the world.
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Most soundwalks are tied to a specific location: pre-composed content triggered by GPS coordinates. Walk outside the route and the experience breaks. City Songs takes the opposite approach.
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Instead of composing for a fixed path, we built a context classification pipeline. The app reads the listener's real-world environment (weather, sun position, temperature, environment type) using custom parsers for OpenStreetMap data. It classifies the context and generates a site-specific sonic experience in real time.
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Walk through a park in Tokyo, a street in Lagos, a harbor in Bergen: each produces a different experience, because the parameters are different. But the musical logic is the same.
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The system also uses GPT-4 for location-specific poetry, weaving textual fragments into the generative audio layer based on the cultural and geographic context of the listener's position.
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Why this matters beyond art: the context classification pipeline we built for City Songs is the direct precursor to our adaptive automotive sound systems. The same architecture (sense context, classify, generate) now runs in vehicles. From soundwalks to product sound, the underlying problem is identical: make sound that responds to where you are and what's happening around you.

An experimental project funded by FilmFernsehFond Bayern.
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The Planets - The Planets Experience the famous orchestral suite "The Planets" by Gustav Holst as an interactive audio walk with smartphone and headphones.