Adrian Schmidt

KOUP Music

Closed Beta | 2024

KOUP Music is a community platform designed to transform music creation, currently in closed beta with a growing community of users and seed funding. As the Creative Technologist, I collaborated with artists to explore, train, and deploy AI music models using Python and Docker. Additionally, I developed the backend with Next.js and Supabase, and created an adaptive user interface.

KOUP Music Website
Three screenshots of the Koup platforms – the login, the homepage, and the studio page

Project Details

Team

Kopi Su Studios

Role

Creative Technologist

AI Researcher

Full Stack Developer

Tools

Python

Next.js

Supabase

Tailwind CSS

Fine-Tuning AI Models

KOUP evolved from Sonic Mutations, a bespoke tool I helped to create for artists performing at the Sydney Opera House. The platform had evolved significantly during the year I was away. My first task was to research the latest advances in AI music models – assessing their output quality and exploring how they could be fine-tuned. I examined and fine-tuned several models, including MusicGen, StableAudio, and Riffusion. After weighing the pros and cons of each approach, I settled on MusicGen as the base model due to its superior audio quality and the fact that we no longer needed real-time generation as we had with Riffusion.

Click around above to listen to the different kinds of outputs from KOUP. Each audio clip is generated from a different artist's fine-tuned model.

From Performance Tool to Platform

The next challenge was transforming this specialised performance instrument into a versatile platform. Users needed greater freedom in model selection and prompting capabilities. I expanded the customisation panel to expose more model parameters, giving musicians finer control over their generated audio. As the project's developer, I also integrated authentication systems, enabling user accounts, credit management, file uploads, and persistent data across sessions.

Our early testing sessions revealed that many musicians saw this as a tool they could use on the go, making mobile optimisation a priority, so I created a drawer menu system that allowed quick switching between options and playback controls on smaller screens.

Using the KOUP studio interface to quickly remix audio on mobile.

Showcasing and Outcomes

KOUP's presence at SXSW demonstrated the platform's potential, with musicians grasping the different ways it could fit into their creative workflows. The closed beta has continued growing, attracting seed funding and building a community of hundreds of users who are contributing to defining responsible AI-assisted music creation.

A group of people gathered in a booth at SXSW, looking at and interacting with the KOUP interface displayed on a screen.

Visitors testing KOUP at SXSW, where they could record and manipulate audio with the platform's interface on a touch screen.