What did we talk about at the second SoundSoftware workshop?

The second edition of the SoundSoftware workshop on Software and Data for Audio and Music Researchers took place last Wednesday, 26 June 2013. During this one-day event the invited speakers and the audience had the opportunity to discuss the challenges of working with software and data in audio and music research.

Now in its second year of existence, this one-day workshop was once again held at Queen Mary University of London. The invited speakers came from a range of industrial and academic backgrounds with many focusing on their personal experiences developing software, which helped turning this into a very relaxed and enjoyable day (you can see the workshop's original programme here).

The workshop kicked off with Nick Barnes, from the Climate Code Foundation, explaining the 10 reasons he believes explain why research software code should be made public. This opened a day in which themes such as open source, quality assurance and impact were omnipresent.

Jamie Bullock, from the Birmingham Conservatoire followed with a talk on user experience and how many academic projects could benefit from it in order to generate more impact. The morning session then closed with Becky Stewart describing her personal experience of founding and working on Codasign, a tech-based company that delivers courses and works as a consultancy firm in the areas of audio, music and performance.

Just before lunch there was time for two brief notes—Chris Cannam from the SoundSoftware Project announced the results of the first edition of the SoundSoftware Prizes for Reproducible Reseach and Brian Hole, from Ubiquity Press, introducing the audience to the Journal of Open Research Software.

The afternoon was as varied as the morning. It started with Mahendra Mahey giving a talk about the British Library Labs, a new initiative of the Digital Scholarships Department of the British Library. Bryan Pardo, from Northwestern University, described his experience developing TuneBot, with an emphasis on software development and data sharing in an academic environment.

Mathieu Barthet, from the Queen Mary, University of London, gave a talk on the BBC Desktop Jukebox project, in which he worked jointly with the BBC R&D Department and the company I Like Music.

The last session started with Angus Hewlett, from FXpansion, sharing his experience and views on developing research-driven software in a commercial environment. Then the last talk was delivered by Luis Figueira, from the SoundSoftware project, describing our experience teaching better software techniques to researchers, forcusing on the activities developed together with Software Carpentry.

The workshop closed with a panel discussion, composed of Bryan Pardo, Jamie Bullock, Becky Stewart and Nick Barnes and chaired by Mark Plumbley. The panel, together with the audience, discussed a variety of topics, such as the importance of embedding software developers in research groups or how to make sustainable software development a reality from the start of the research cycle.

Even though this year's edition was not quite as well attended as last year's, we believe that this was a very interesting day for those involved. We'll be releasing footage from the workshop soon, so watch this space!