Dave Foster is a musician and audio software developer. He works as a musician in the recording industry, as well as developing custom audio applications both for in-house automation and to the specifications of other businesses.

Recent training in digital signal processing, music information retrieval and machine learning have meant that he is working at the cutting edge of audio development, and is able to incorporate the most recent research and techniques into audio solutions. His experience in both the music and software engineering fields mean that he is uniquely skilled for projects that span the two disciplines.

Example Projects

Some examples of Dave’s work:

Multi-band Dynamic Range Compressor

This is a multi-platform audio plugin, developed in C++ using the JUCE framework. The github page for the plugin can be found here.

Bass Autotune

Another audio plugin, a (partially successful) implementation of Autotune specifically for bass instruments, can be found here.

Colour Sounds Piano

One of Dave’s ongoing projects is teaching his children music, and he has developed several bespoke iOS applications with which to engage them. A video showing one of the projects, an interactive piano tutor (developed with SpriteKit / Swift), can be found here.

Education

• In his spare time, Dave studied for a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science with the Open University, obtaining a First Class degree in 2016.

• More recently, he has completed a MSc in Sound and Music Computing with the C4DM at Queen Mary University, where he achieved a rare distinction.

• His MSc project “Reproducing Bass Guitar Performances Using Descriptor Driven Synthesis” has been submitted to the prestigious AES conference for publication.

• At QMUL, he was also introduced to the disciplines of machine learning and deep learning, and he worked with researchers on the cutting edge of the technologies on their implementation in audio software.

Swing City Music

• Dave has run Swing City Music, a boutique company that has been helping artists get their music from conception to the page since 2006.

• He works as a orchestrator and conductor for film, TV and video games.

• Clients include Max Richter (Hostiles, Vivaldi Recomposed), Craig Armstrong (Bridget Jones’s Baby, Far From The Madding Crowd), Murray Gold (Doctor Who, Life Story), Hybrid (Light of the Fearless, Interlude in Prague) and Bob Ezrin (Peter Gabriel, U2, Andrea Bocelli).

• Other recent projects include a collaboration with Sony Playstation, working with their audio team on the music for all of their recent in-house VR games.

• For a full record of clients and projects, see the SCM IMDB page.

Contact

Contact Dave via his Linkedin page here.