How the prototypes are made
Made in practice
Some prototypes come from my own work at the mastering desk, others from the engineers and producers I make them with.
Making and learning
Creators, engineers and enthusiasts can now make their own tools, and learn from making them: each version teaches something about the craft, until the tool is useful in daily work and carries its maker’s own way of hearing.
The agentic era
AI coding agents take over the work that used to need a software team. I decide what each tool does and judge every version musically; the agents write the code.
Measurement and listening
Twenty years of listening for a living, first on stage, then at the mastering desk, and the work is still driven by learning: how audio processing behaves, and how the ear perceives it. Each prototype rests on many rounds of measurement and listening experiments. Agentic methods make that scale possible: one person can design, run and compare far more experiments than by hand.
The research behind the tools (how listeners use words for sound, where meters and ears disagree, and how a machine should take part in a listening decision) is published at narrativa.dev.
Judged musically
Measurements show what a version does; whether it stays is a musical judgement, never a technical one, made by me and by the engineers and producers testing it. A control stays only if it earns its place in the music. Where it can, a control is named for what you hear, not for the engineering behind it.
Together with collaborators
Some prototypes are teamwork with an engineer or producer: both sides’ expertise and musical sense go into one plug-in.
The Bench is something else
The Master’s Bench is separate research: it opens a plug-in’s behaviour up into modules that can be heard and shaped, to build with and to learn from, bringing the maths and engineering behind a tool closer to the people who use it.