Ilias Bergström is a software engineer, researcher, and musician from Sweden. For most of his professional career, spanning over 20 years, he has been working on, as he describes it, “time-based media software.”
In the audio programming world, this means digital audio workstations, video editors, and live audio-visual performance software.
He generously shared his experience in Audio Developer Conference talks, two of which discuss the much underrepresented topic of the software architecture of digital audio workstations.
Software architecture and software design are fascinating topics to me, so I naturally devoured both of these talks 😉
In this interview, we explore not only Ilias’s journey but also go into the details of what makes audio software design hard. He discusses how he connects the dots between different types of media software through his long-running personal project, TWO, which is best described as a Media Control Workstation. It enables the simultaneous interactive combination of digital media control signals (such as OSC and MIDI) from multiple sources.
Finally, we don’t shy away from discussing our favorite books on audio software development! Given that Ilias shares a ton of valuable tips and resources, you don’t want to miss this one!
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Episode Contents
From this episode, you will learn:
- How Ilias’s interest in media creation software led to a career in audio, across both research and industry.
- How he combines music and audio with interaction design, Human Computer Interaction, and even topics such as neuroscience and psychology, and how audio development can be seen as a form of creative coding.
- How different media creation software tools (like DAWs) share the same core characteristics and core architecture.
- Insights into his personal software project, TWO.
- What does a PhD give you? What can a university education offer?
- The importance of software architecture, testing, and documentation.
- A lot of audio development book recommendations.
- Practical advice on how to get started with audio development and audio software architecture.
This episode was recorded on January 15, 2025.
00:00:00 Podcast Intro
00:00:34 Introducing Ilias Bergstrom
00:02:15 Ilias' Background
00:02:50 Getting into Music
00:03:21 Developing Interest in Audio
00:05:03 Masters at UCL
00:07:32 Wolfsound: Learning DSP
00:08:46 Starting Industry Career
00:12:58 PhD at UCL
00:14:24 PhD Research
00:16:25 What does a PhD give you?
00:18:58 Post-doc at Event Lab
00:22:28 Post-doc at KTH
00:24:23 Teaching Career
00:25:15 What is Creative Coding?
00:26:58 Back to the Industry - SCISS
00:28:06 Work at SCISS on Uniview
00:31:24 Elk Audio
00:34:10 Sponsor: JUCE
00:35:41 Future Career Plans
00:36:31 TWO: Media Control Workstation
00:41:08 The Development of TWO
00:46:46 Opinions on Audio-Visual Performance
00:48:45 Writing Large-Scale Software
00:51:08 Software Design in Freelance Projects
00:53:40 Software Architecture
00:58:53 Architecture of Time-Based Media Software
01:01:24 Architecture of Digital Audio Workstations
01:03:00 Documenting Software Architecture
01:07:53 Book Recommendations
01:16:41 Learning Suggestions
01:19:24 Final Quick-Fire Questions
01:24:42 Connecting With Ilias
01:27:00 Outro
