/ About this event
What's actually missing from the future of sound?
The conversation around AI and music has been hijacked by one topic: generative music. But generation is just one layer of a much deeper set of unsolved, under-discussed, and commercially consequential problems.
Today's music AI models can't reliably produce music outside Western tonal systems — failing on the quarter tones, maqam, raga traditions, and more that underpin hundreds of millions of listeners' musical cultures. And we still don't adequately understand how people actually perceive and evaluate AI-generated vs. human-made music — a gap that shapes trust, adoption, and every creative tool built on top of these models. An intimate fireside with two practitioners working on different frontiers of what music AI still gets wrong.
An intimate fireside with 2 founders working on different frontiers of what music AI still gets wrong.
🎤 The speakers
Jad Al Masri — Founder & CEO, Motif (Techstars '25). A violinist and composer of world music, IP lawyer and technologist, Jad is building culturally inclusive music AI infrastructure, backed by Techstars and the Australian Government. He has presented his work at Berklee, MIT, the Audio Developer Conference and NY Music Month, and heads to ISMIR 2026 in Abu Dhabi in November.
Sho Mitchell — Co-founder & CEO, Beatlibrary. Beatlibrary is building a human-first, rights-clean music library and registry, with fingerprinting and provenance tools that track where music comes from.
🤝 The hosts
Brought to you by Motif (culturally inclusive music AI infrastructure) and Beatlibrary (human-first music library and provenance platform). 2 companies coming at the same question from different angles: what should music AI actually be built on?
🎯 What we'll get into
The cultural blind spot — why current music AI fails on non-Western music, and why it's an evaluation problem before it's a data problem
The provenance gap — how to prove what's human-made, where it came from and whether it was licensed, and what that means for every product built on generative models
The commercial case for depth — where real differentiation lives as generative fidelity becomes table stakes
The meaning of music — the spiritual and philosophical case for why we make music at all, at a time when AI has called it into question
What's next — the tools, datasets and frameworks that need to exist for music AI to serve creators and listeners across traditions
⏱ The format Arrive from 6pm. Fireside starts between 6:45 and 7pm: 45 min of conversation + audience Q&A, then 1 hr of networking. Seats in the Live Room are first come, first served. Everyone else can watch the stream on the TVs around the space.
💡 Who this is for This event is a must if you're investing in audio AI, building in music tech, researching creative computing, engineering the tools, or making music that doesn't fit neatly into a 12-tone system.
You'll spend an evening with 2 founders who live in this field instead of just talking about it. You'll dig into the specific technical and cultural problems most panels gloss over, and leave with real connections to the founders, researchers, engineers and creators shaping what music AI sounds like next.
This event is a part of #LATechWeek, a week of events hosted by VCs and startups to bring together the tech ecosystem. Learn more at www.tech-week.com.
