Into the Dragon's Den

Postgraduate composer Ben Mawson tells us about his prize-winning entry in a digital project competition, which involved making a speedy (and obviously very convincing!) pitch to industry experts:

Composer Ben Mawson at work on geolocated sound

During my research at Southampton on Virtual Music Performance, I’ve been working on building a collaborative team to develop a system for listeners to walk inside a musical composition. Using binaural audio rendering and listener-tracking, it is a way of making complex fixed digital audio output seem to be live – each audition can be different according to the route and position of the listener.

So, having spent a disproportionate amount of my time over the past couple of years on this, it was a wonderful opportunity to enter the Dragons’ Den Business Plan Competition at Digital Economy Conference SXSC3, in November.

The day was brilliantly organised and hosted by Dr Lorraine Warren, DIrector of the Centre for Strategic Innovation in the Faculty of Business and Law. In addition to the seven competitors at the Dragons’ Den Business Plan Competition, several speakers of renown addressed delegates on digitisation and new models for the digital economy.

I was particularly taken by the presentation of Professor Sally Jane Norman (Sussex University), asking what role digitisation plays in the upholding of the creative criticality on which productive social awareness depends. It was an honour to follow Professor Norman as the last speaker of the day, where I gave a round-up of the hows and whys of creating music you can walk inside, including early development of 3DBARE and the other tool which I have been using for two years, noTours by Escoitar, to annotate landscape with audio using GPS-enabled interactive mapping.

In the competition, there were four speakers before me and two afterwards – my first impression was how dauntingly clever the competition all were. Brilliant ideas, well-framed in a three minute pitch that demonstrated their viability and value.

So getting up fifth in line to speak, I realised the only way to make my pitch stand out was to abandon the carefully sequenced notes I was holding and put on a jazz solo of a speech.

It seemed to work. My surprise though took several days to get over, after the announcement of 1st prize for 3DBARE and £7,000 for proof of concept development, to be spent over the next six months.

Now, gathering up the threads of several older attempts towards efficient rendering, the nascent user interface and of course the light at the end of the tunnel – full wireless tracking to control multi-channel binaural audio – I have started to work with two new programmers whose expertise and experience of coding will be invaluable during our tricky next stage of the adventure.

For more information about 3DBARE, please visit my website and blog. The SXSC3 conference was also live reported by the virtuosic Ladies of the Press who produced a stunning acetate covered brochure of the day’s speakers, competition and discussions by close of play, astonishing work! And in this video (see below) you can see me explaining the project.