AI MusicCon · STC21

Dr. Kerstin Bäcker

Attorney, Lecturer

Dr. Kerstin Bäcker ist seit 2001 Rechtsanwältin bei Lausen Rechtsanwälte, seit 2004 verantwortet sie als Partnerin den Standort Köln.

Zukunftsthemen und innovative Produkte sind die Spielwiese von Dr. Kerstin Bäcker. Seit Jahren beschäftigt sie sich mit der Adaptation des urheberrechtlichen Rahmens an neue technische Entwicklungen im Rahmen der individuellen und kollektiven Lizenzierung und damit im Zusammenhang stehender Business Cases: Angefangen von der Verantwortlichkeit von Plattformen und Social Media für Nutzerinhalte (YouTube, Cyberlocker, etc.) bis hin zur Künstlichen Intelligenz, dem Metaverse und NFTs.

Zu ihren Mandanten zählen auch klassische Bildungsunternehmen, Verlage, Kulturinstitutionen sowie Musik-, Audio- und Filmproduktionsunternehmen.

Erfahrungen im Ausland sammelte sie bei international tätigen Kanzleien in Paris, Kapstadt, Melbourne und Barcelona.

Dr. Kerstin Bäcker studierte an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München und als Teilnehmerin des integrierten, deutsch-französischen Studiengangs an der Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II, Frankreich) mit Schwerpunkt Europa- und internationales Recht. Sie erwarb dort die Licence en Droit. Ihre Promotion an der Technischen Universität Dresden erfolgte über die Stellung der Leistungsschutzberechtigten im digitalen Zeitalter unter Einbeziehung der Rechtssituation in Frankreich, den USA und dem Vereinten Königreich. Dr. Kerstin Bäcker ist Fachanwältin für Urheber- und Medienrecht.

Neben ihrer Tätigkeit als Rechtsanwältin ist Dr. Kerstin Bäcker Referentin bei der Akademie der Deutschen Medien sowie Gastreferentin bei verschiedenen Institutionen, unter anderem der Hochschule Ansbach und dem Steinbeis Institut. Zudem engagiert sie sich als Moderatorin, etwa bei der Initiative „Die Zukunft des Verlegens“. Sie ist unter anderem Autorin beim Handbuch für Musikwirtschaft und dem Handbuch Kulturmanagement und veröffentlicht in nationalen und internationalen Fachzeitschriften.

Yevgeni Birkhoff

Composer, Sound Designer

Yevgeni Birkhoff works as a composer, music producer, and sound designer. He creates music for media and international large scale event productions, composes and produces songs, and engages in the creation of acoustic sound art. Birkhoff's musical diversity is evident in his wide-ranging repertoire, from authentic EDM tracks and Musique Concrète soundscapes to orchestral scores. He has applied his talent and expertise to create tailored music and sound designs for renowned brands and clients such as Mercedes, Porsche, Electronic Arts, the Chinese Ministry of Tourism and Emaar Properties. His sound installations have been exhibited in prestigious institutions worldwide, including the German Rock and Pop Museum in Gronau, the Mann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

In 2010, Birkhoff received the Peer Raben Award at "Soundtrack Cologne" for the best music in a short film. Additionally, many of the large-scale events underscored with his music have been recognized with international event industry awards, including the BrandEx Award in 2019, the German Design Award in 2016, and The Special Event 2015 Gala Award.

Recently, Yevgeni Birkhoff has been engaging with real-time media and Artificial Intelligence. He regularly holds lectures and workshops, sharing his expertise in these cutting-edge fields. In his teachings, he contributes his broad knowledge and innovative perspectives on how these technologies can be leveraged in music, audio post and event productions. His insights are highly valued in both academic institutions and industry forums.

Michael P. Aust

Festivaldirector SoundTrack_Cologne and Producer TelevisorTroika GmbH

Business graduate (Dipl.-Kfm.) Michael P. Aust is a German curator, organiser of cultural events and film producer born in 1965. His focal point of interest lies in the intersectionality of art forms, especially in the relationship of music and moving pictures. He heads the filmmusic festival and conference SoundTrack_Cologne that he founded in 2004 – with 850 accreditations Europe’s leading filmmusic industry event – as well as SoundTrack_Zurich since 2020. Parallel from 2014-2019 he was festivaldirector of Braunschweig International Filmfestival that grew to 28.000 admissions under his direction.

Aust has worked in the film industry for more than 25 years with producer credits for 21 feature films and feature-length documentaries, including “101 Reykjavik”, “Stumbling Block”, “Low Lights”, “Parallax Sounds Chicago”, “Eva Hesse” and “The Sound of Cologne”, focusing on music and art. His directorial debut “Can and Me”, co-produced by WDR, hit the cinemas and film festivals in spring 2023. 

Michael curates exhibitions and festivals e.g. DuKunst Media Art Festival 1992, Klangvisionen sound art exhibition 1994, StadtKlangNetz conference on cultural education 2007-2014, European Film Music Day at Cannes Film Festival 2009-2016, the highly successful The Art of Pop Video exhibition (MAKK Cologne 2011, Odessa Art Center 2012, Liverpool FACT 2013), Next Level Conference on video games 2012, PLAY!CGN exhibition and conference on video games in art 2013, Digital Distribution conference 2014, BIFF Film Criticism LAB: on the Future of Film Criticism 2015, Hostile Sisters - Interdependencies of Theatre and Film conference 2016, FxM Film meets Music Festival 2018+19. His latest project is the 30-month Re-Educating Digitisation funded by Erasmus+.

He is a voting member of the German Film Academy, Filmbüro NW and of the World Soundtrack Academy and Board Member of KulturNetzKöln and MusicFilmFestivalNetwork. He is Managing Director, Owner and Producer at TelevisorTroika GmbH, a Cologne-based company established in 1993 for film production, art events and public relations in arts.

Prof. Lüdger Brümmer

Composer, Head of Institut für Musik und Akustik / Hertz-Lab am ZKM Karlsruhe

Prof Ludger Brümmer works in the field of algorithmic experimental composition, is Professor of Composition with Digital Media in Trossingen and has been Director of the Institute for Music and Acoustics / Hertz-Lab at the ZKM Karlsruhe since 2003. 

Hayat Chaoui

Singer, Author

Hayat Chaoui is a singer, singing teacher, author and head of the singing department at the Bergische Musikschule Wuppertal. Her intercultural women's choir "WoW - Women of Wuppertal" has received several awards. Her books "KIWI - 80 Children's and Lullabies from all over the World" and "WoW - Women of Our World" have been published by Helbling and Breitkopf & Härtel and have been awarded the German Music Edition Prize "Best Edition", among others. Chaoui is a member of the presidium of the State Music Council of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Prof. Michael Edwards

Composer, Improvisor, Software Developer

Michael Edwards is a composer, improvisor, software developer, and since 2017 Professor of Electronic Composition at ICEM, Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen. His compositional interests lie mainly in the development of structures for hybrid electro-instrumental pieces through the integration of algorithmically produced scored materials with similarly generated computer-processed sound. Michael Edwards ist member of the head of Landesmusikrat NRW.

Florian Gardin

Data Scientist, Software Engineer

I am a data scientist and software engineer with over a decade of experience. I am also a musician and an independent video game composer. As the CTO of MusicLang, I lead the development of generative music AI tools that act as true assistants for artists, focusing on the score rather than the audio. We are dedicated to integrating our technology into our customer's products designed for musicians.

On a personal note, I have always been fascinated by the use of algorithms in art. I believe that, when used wisely and fairly, AI can provide a valuable co-pilot & teacher experience in music composition. My goal is to help artists spend more time revolutionizing their creative expression instead of getting caught up in too many technical details.

Thomas Hanz

Leiter des Netzwerks Musikschule.digital.NRW

Thomas Hanz ist Referent für Digitalisierung beim Landesverband der Musikschulen in NRW und Leiter des Netzwerks Musikschule.digital.NRW

Felix Herrmann

Digitalization Expert, IT-Project Manager

Felix Herrmann ist Digital Enthusiast, TYPO3-Spezialist und Vorsitzender der Chorjugend NRW.

Matthias Hornschuh

Composer

Matthias Hornschuh lives and works as a film and radio play composer in Cologne. The studied musician and musicologist teaches at various European colleges and universities and is part of the founding team of SoundTrack_Cologne, which he left 2018.
Hornschuh is involved in industry and cultural politics, among others in the professional association mediamusic, in the Landesmusikrat NRW and in the supervisory board of GEMA. Since 2021, Hornschuh has represented the interests of German authors and performers in Berlin and Brussels as spokesman for the authors rights initiative (Initiative Urheberrecht).

Janina Klabes

Live Event Presenter

Janina Klabes has been a presenter of live events with a focus on business, culture and politics for over 10 years. She studied music business (B.A.) at the Popakademie Baden-Württemberg, where she also found her band MBWTEYP. During the band's eight-year history, she got to know the small and large stages as well as how show business works. She worked behind the scenes for Universal Music in Berlin and the Popakademie's own artist agency „klinkt" for several years before taking over the management of the music industry cluster in Mannheim in 2010, where she advised and networked founders and musicians on behalf of the city. During this time she discovered her talent and passion for moderation, which she has been doing as a freelancer ever since. Since 2014 she has also worked as a brand manager for an insurance company.

Dr. Anselm Kreuzer

Composer

Anselm Kreuzer began playing the Cello at age 9 and soon discovered composing as his major passion. Already back then he combined the classical approach with modern sounds. After finishing school he studied musicology, media science and phonetics at the Cologne University and achieved a Ph.D. with a dissertation on Film Music. During his time as a student, he received several assignments for media compositions, especially in the field of radio and television. Now, he is a designated specialist for TV title themes, station IDs, scores for series and TV drama as well as music for new media and advertising.

Anselm also has an oeuvre of more than 1000 internationally successful production music titles. Among the magazine and news shows he has composed for are Weltreisen (ARD), Check Eins - Neuneinhalb (ARD), Die Chefin (ZDF), Die lustigsten Schlamassel (RTL), Lebensläufe (MDR), RBB UM6 (RBB), ZIBB (RBB), Täter Opfer Polizei (RBB). He recently scored for TV series like Küstenwache, Kripo Holstein - Mord und Meer (ZDF), Rosenheim-Cops (ZDF), In Aller Freundschaft (ARD) and documentaries like Natur Exklusiv (BR).

He is co-founder of the production music label MUSIC SCULPTOR. Whether symphonic orchestra or electronic approach - Anselm has a passionate faible for emotional, narrative and often catchy thematic music that merges with moving pictures and stories. He often transcends the borders between composition and sound design, and passes on his know-how to students at several universities and media schools as a guest lecturer. He is also engaged as a working group leader in the media industry association Eyes & Ears of Europe and as a board member of the Composers Club Germany and the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance (ECSA).

Alissa Krusch

Managerin Digitale Transformation

Alissa is committed to the transformation of cultural institutions.
As an expert in digitality, she accompanies the State Music Council of North Rhine-Westphalia in its main focus topic of 2022-24.

Dave Murray-Rust

Academic, Artist & Musician

I’m an academic, artist and musician, interested in musical improvisation, particularly ways that I can use digital means of making and manipulating sound fluidly across time, timbre and space using physical gesture.

I recieved a PhD from Edinburgh University in 2007 on AI and music, in particular investigating how we can look at shared improvisation as a dialogue, in order to allow intelligent agents to become partners in improvisation. Now I do most of my musicking with humans. My longest running music project is the laptop trio Raw Green Rust. We experiment with algorithms that modulate improvisational dynamics, exploring blurred agencies, creative failures and finding beat-like structures in soups of resampled glitches. We've played at Sonorities, Convergence, Hear and Now (Radio 3) among others, and have an album out on Superpang. Taking the interactive agencies further, we have been awarded a Centre for Data, Culture and Society Research Prize for Jules Rawlinson's Antagonistic Sextet.

Personally, I'm working with ideas about how human and machine agencies intermix, how digital interventions can shape both micro and macro approaches to playing and how the transcendent internal space of improvising practice can survive the the screens and cables of computational approaches.

Andre Schnoor

AI Expert

Andre has a long history of supporting creative people with tools and
platforms. After building VR-based social networks even before the Internet
was a thing, he founded a venture-backed music promotion platform used
by tens of thousands of artists and musicians, similar to what Soundcloud is
today.
His love of music and his own practice in songwriting and composition
fueled the vision of a tool that could handle music on a conceptual level to
enable creative experimentation with musical ideas. This provided the
impetus for founding Cognitone.
Andre holds a Master's degree in Computer Science (Diplom) with a
specialization in AI, ML and Computational Linguistics. He is critical of
current trends in generative AI that threaten to devalue human expression.

Prof. Dr. Christine Siegert

Musicologist

Prof. Dr. Christine Siegert is a musicologist, head of the archive of the Beethoven-Haus Bonn and the publishing house of the Beethoven-Haus. She is President of the State Music Council of North Rhine-Westphalia, and since October 2023 Chairwoman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the State Institute for Music Research Berlin. Publications, including writings on Beethoven and Haydn research, editor of volumes in the complete edition of Joseph Haydn's works, co-editor of the Bonn Beethoven Studies and general editor of the Beethoven Complete Edition.

Marju Sokman

Marketing & Communications Expert

Marju Sokman is an AI-curious marketing expert and founder of Bespoke Marketing. With a keen focus on how AI is reshaping marketing and communication, Marju shares her expertise as a lecturer and consultant. 

She's convinced that in an AI-driven landscape, a strong strategy and well-executed content creation are the keys to creating a compelling brand and standing out.

As AI makes content creation easier, the competition is getting tougher. In this session, Marju will explore how AI can be leveraged to address target groups more effectively and enhance marketing strategies. 

She will walk us through different uses of AI tools where they can help with marketing and communication and discuss strategies for creating content that stands out from mediocre AI-generated material.

Prof. Dr. Francisco Tigre-Moura

Academic, Researcher

Prof. Dr. Francisco Tigre Moura is a professor of marketing at IU University of Applied Sciences (Bad Honnef, Germany). Originally from Brazil, Prof. Dr. Tigre Moura concluded a PhD in marketing in 2012 at the University of Otago in New Zealand where he was awarded for exceptional thesis. Since 2016 his research has focused on topics such artificial creativity, music, technology experiences and general consumer behavior. Some of his recent studies has focused on listeners’ perceptions of artificially composed music.

Mehdi Zatar

CEO & Co-Founder MusicLang

I’m the CEO & co-founder of MusicLang, where we are developing a composition co-pilot for building the next generation of music apps. We are convinced that generative technologies should act as companions to artists in the music creation process, rather than as tools capable of composing pieces autonomously. Recent breakthroughs in AI, especially with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), have demonstrated the potential of generative technologies in an industry where creativity is continuously pushed forward. We’ll be showcasing our product, demonstrating how the rich information contained in symbolic music can leverage the full capabilities of LLMs.

Regarding my background, I’ve held various product manager roles over the last 10 years at Orange, Rocket Internet, and Dataiku.