About Maestra

Made for real artists, by real artists and engineers

Maestra started with a simple idea, that the tools around music should keep you in the music.

The company

Maestra Labs, in Oslo

Maestra Motion Labs AS is a company in Oslo, Norway, founded by William French, a musician and producer. Maestra makes software instruments for people who make electronic music.

We started with movement: turning motion-capture gloves into an instrument for sound, light and visuals.

Agent brought the same idea into Ableton, where you can type the change you have in mind and see it happen in the session.

Company

Maestra Motion Labs AS

Based in

Oslo, Norway

Founded by

William French, musician and producer

Org number

934 949 900

The instruments

One family, built around the music

Maestra Agent

The AI agent for Ableton Live. It reads the session, works in bars, tracks and devices, makes the change and reads it back, and remembers the project. It runs on any edition of Live.

Maestra Motion

The stage, played by hand. Hand movement becomes MIDI and OSC control of Ableton Live, and of light, lasers and image, on a driver and gesture models we built ourselves. It works with Manus motion-capture gloves, and a webcam hand-tracking input is in development.

Ear

Maestra's hearing. It captures bars from Live and measures loudness, spectrum, dynamics, stereo, groove and tonality, so Maestra can act on what it hears. Ear ships inside Maestra Agent today.

TouchDesigner

A Maestra Agent for TouchDesigner, in development with a partner. Coming soon.

The team

A small team, and the people around it

Maestra is built by a founder, with advisors and consultants who carry specific parts of the work.

William French

Founder

A musician and producer. William started Maestra and builds the product.

Filip Elverhøy

Advisor

Works with Maestra on business and partnerships.

Kristian Torstveit

Consultant

Builds the Maestra Agent for TouchDesigner.

Backing

Supported by Innovation Norway

Maestra Labs is supported by Innovation Norway. The company received an Oppstartstilskudd, a start-up grant, for the market-clarification phase of its work.

The grant funds external work such as market validation, partner dialogue and quality assurance while the product is built.

  • Innovation Norway

What we hold to

Three things, in order

Trust

Maestra asks before anything destructive, shows every action it takes, and makes no claim on your music. The session stays in your hands.

Precision

Maestra works in bars, tracks and devices, and reads back what it changed. It would rather be exact than impressive.

Flow

The point is to keep you in the music. Maestra takes the grind and puts the ambitious work within reach, so the session keeps moving.

On AI in music

Where we stand

We want more of a session to go into making music, and less into setting things up. Motion connects movement to sound, light and visuals. Agent lets you ask for changes inside Ableton. Both keep the artist in charge.

AI in music divides people, and both sides have a point. It can make you faster and lower the barrier to starting. It can also be trained on work that was taken without asking, and it can be unreliable and wasteful. We hold to a simple line.

So Maestra Agent asks before anything destructive, shows every step, reads back the result, and sends nothing to be trained on. Maestra generates no audio and no finished music. It operates your session, and on stage it is played.

For

  • Expression
  • Flow
  • The body in the loop
  • Verified actions
  • The artist's ownership

Against

  • Slop
  • Wasteful use
  • Unverified actions
  • Data taking
  • Training on artists' work