MTF Labs AB

Music Tech Fest AB is the Swedish spinoff of London’s design innovation lab Stromatolite LTD. It was first established in 2012 as a UK company and spinoff of the FP7 CSA Roadmap for Music Information Research (MIReS) with the aim of uniting artists and scientists, academia and industry in the space of common understanding, and quickly grew into a global community platform of creative innovators which currently counts over 7000 members. The Music Tech Fest community includes creators from all areas of expertise, ages and social backgrounds. Regular gatherings in a week-long festivals focus on creative testbeds, showcases of innovation, and experimental co-creation with novel technological toolkits. Music Tech Fest large multi-day events have been supported by over 150 organisations, and hosted 14 times around the world by partners including IRCAM at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in London, and Microsoft Research New England, with several creative laboratories running in various European cities and ongoing project support programmes. In 2018 Music Tech Fest established an annual flagship festival in Stockholm, in partnership with KTH Royal Institute of Technology, its project WASP for 10 years of research into AI, and Stockholm City Business Region, to run yearly in the first week of September, with a satellite event in March, hosted by a series of European cities. During MTF Stockholm Music Tech Fest over 800 people (from high level experts from different fields to citizens, school children, young people from immigrant communities and those with learning difficulties, became the first multi-gender (female; male; other; prefer not to say) technology platform to have over 50% women participants. Upon invitation by the media art authority Peter Weibel, the MTF satellite event ran at ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. In 2019 Music Tech Fest is running in Frankfurt, Zagreb, Stockholm and Bergen, with satellites in Austin TX, Vienna, Mannheim, Belgrade, Inverness, Tromsø, Marrakesh, Sofia and Auckland NZ. Music Tech Fest is multidisciplinary, international, enriching, inclusive, and prides itself on being a technology enabler with an even gender split.

In March 2014, inspired by Music Tech Fest Boston, luminary academic researchers from the Music Tech Fest community gathered at Microsoft Research New England to write the Manifesto for Music Technology Research, claiming MTF as a multidisciplinary research platform. The Music Tech Fest community has provided the test ground for methodologies developed for ICT&ART (FET ART) which yielded the STARTS programme, and has been the originator of #MusicBricks, an 18-month long H2020 Innovation Action which yielded 11 products, 5 papers, 2 book chapters, several awards, patent applications, policy recommendations and methodologies adopted at high level for future directions of the EU Research Programme. As beneficiaries of this action, members of the MTF community have received a series of recognitions, including 1M€ followup SME instrument funding, inclusion in Prix Ars Electronica state-of-the-art list, winner of the Hungarian National Video Awards, 30 Under 30 Entrepreneurs by Forbes Israel, Under 35 Innovators by MIT, Swedish Patenting Application for Primary Industry, and Winner of the Wearable Technologies World Cup. Michela Magas, Innovation Director of #MusicBricks, received in 2017 the European Commission First Prize Award for Women Innovators and in 2016 Innovation Luminary for Creative Innovation.

Music Tech Fest has fed policy recommendations directly from the grass roots to the European Commission and to the G7 leaders. It is quoted extensively in the EU policy guidelines on Innovation Ecosystems, IoT, AI and DIH recommendations, as well as AI Innovation for the G7 and Open Innovation strategy and policy. Following active involvement of industry with the Music Tech Fest community, the methodologies developed by #MusicBricks within the Music Tech Fest ecosystem have been scaled up to include all industry in the Industry Commons, which was launched at the EC’s Open Innovation Conference on the 13th of June 2017, and has resulted in a new Working Group on Industrial Applications which unites DG RTD, DG Grow and DG Connect. Music Tech Fest is Associate Partner and is providing the test ground for the new EU project MAST - Master in Art, Science and Technology - which aims to develop a curriculum based on an open environment for the exchange of knowledge across disciplines.