I’m an avid fan of hip-hop music as well as technology so meeting Manon Dave at Web Summit was too good an opportunity to miss.
The softly-spoken Dave has some serious contacts in both worlds. He is building a technology business with A-list actor Idris Elba, who like Dave started in music, and also collaborating closely with will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, among other artists.
Speaking to me under the Lisbon sun, the award-winning creative engineer says he has looked to bridge music, entertainment and technology for the last 15 years.
“I studied as a software engineer and built a bunch of tech products while pursuing a lifelong dream of making music and learning how to do that through technology. I ended up signing with Universal Music through Idris’s label 7Wallace back in 2020,” says Dave.
“I also scored a couple of TV shows – including Heroes back in the day, while a short film that I scored recently – One Small Visit – was Oscar shortlisted, which was fun.”
Form From Less, his business with Elba, was born out of a shared desire to realise the untapped opportunity at the intersection of culture, entertainment and technology.
One of their projects, created with Stefan Schwartz – veteran of feature films and TV shows Spooks, Luther and The Walking Dead – is Talking Scripts, an iOS app that reads film and TV scripts using different voices for the characters.
“We’ve created it for folks with different abilities. Idris and Stefan are famously dyslexic,” says Dave. “There’s loads of production staff in Hollywood who have English as a second language, for example.
“It basically leverages voice AIs and builds our own layer of interaction on top, whereby you can not only have a script read to you in a kind of audio book style format with really well-crafted characters and intonations, but a filmmaker could even craft those characters within the application.
“So as you’re writing the script, you can start to change the shape of that character and add accents. And if you’re an actor, you could audition with it.
“I think we’re heading in a direction, man, where you can crystallise an idea very, very quickly into a visual form rather than going through that long process of storyboarding and sketching.”
As well as software, Dave has created hardware such as Native Instruments’ MASCHINE. He describes himself as an optimist when it comes to the influence of AI on art.
“I was never the best piano player or guitarist, but I could hear music that I wanted to compose and produce, and it just took for me to leverage technology to make that happen,” he says. “That’s why I created these tools, so people can tap into that potential.”
Dave and will.i.am recently built Sound Drive in collaboration with Mercedes-AMG, which transforms driving into a real-time musical performance.
“It’s going to be rolling out over the course of the next few months in Mercedes vehicles: it essentially takes the way that you drive and uses the data to expressively remix music that you are listening to.”
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He says Elba and Will are exactly the same in real life as they come across in interviews. “Will and I get excited about all the same stuff: great artistry, awesome tech… then geek out on comic books!
“They are both just normal dudes. It’s awesome to see transcend from the screen to the studio.”
Dave, based near Cambridge but a massive fan of Manchester United, recently launched a scholarship at the Royal Northern College of Music in the North West city in memory of his daughter Maia.
Maia was born prematurely at just 28 weeks. “She was a fighter. She survived for 10 days before she passed away through a natural means of infection, which is very hard to prevent in those kind of environments. My wife and I just wanted to do something in her memory.”