Listening Session ASM x Cannes Soundtrack retrospective

Here is a word from Clément Souchier, founder of Bridge.audio, addressed to all participants of ASM x Cannes Soundtrack: he finally unveils a surprise we made for you 👇

A listening session open to all

Mid-May 2023, we announced a partnership for a listening session with Cannes Soundtrack. Our goal was to help all entitled participants (composers, record labels, etc.) get discovered by the members of l’Association des Superviseurs Musicaux (ASM), the French music supervisor association.

This session was a fierce success : by the 1st of June we had already received more than 8000 tracks, amongst which 1357 were identified as having a (very) strong sync potential. In light of the quality of the productions, and driven by the enthusiasm of both partners and participants, we decided to go further with it.

A shared workspace for ASM members

We knew that we couldn’t ask each supervisor from ASM to listen to 1400 tracks split on 6 different projects. Even more so, we knew they couldn’t spontaneously memorize them for future research. (If you don’t know those playlists yet, we warmly invite you to have a listen. Here are the two playlists from the the ast Volume : Cinematic et Sync)

So we created a shared workspace to allow them to surf through all playlisted tracks.

Our Artificial Intelligence tagged each of your tracks, allowing the supervisors to find them

We used our own AI to tag all tracks from the shared workspace, with a high level of details: genre, sub-genre, vocals, instruments, mood…

As you will see, it goes very far! For example, our AI is able to determine the type of singer (man, woman; singing in English, in French, etc..) but also how he sings : is it rapped? Lyrical singing ? It also detects which instruments are used, the BPM, the images we could associate to the track. And, of course, it detects the genre and the emotions coming from the track.

This descriptive depth (it averages 30 characteristics per track !) - combined with the tags the participants already added by themselves - has led to the creation of a very finely described body of work. This will allow music supervisors to perform enhanced searches.

Finding a needle in a haystack, finding the perfect title for a sequence, a commercial, a film… Thanks to the quality of the tracks received and the technological suite offered by Bridge, things are now quick and easy for music supervisors.

If, for example, a supervisor is looking for an epic track, with drums and a female lead singer : they only have to check those tags in the filter bar of their workspace. Bridge will easily and almost instantly show the most relevant results.

As you can see and HEAR in the video above, the results are compelling. To choose the perfect fit, the supervisor will apply its artistic criteria while respecting its project constraints. For instance with this query, not on the whole 1357 tracks, but simply 7 filtered productions.

Your contact info is encoded on each of your tracks!

After a search, if supervisors wish to contact you, we put your contact info in your track metadata ! It can be found in the Comment field.

As you already understand, Bridge facilitates exchanges between all music players : artists, record labels, publishers, music supervisors, media…

Imagine for a moment reproducing this operation without Bridge (!) You’d probably have had to manage the proposals on a simple email box. How do you deal with 2,000+ emails, filled with rough files and links from all sorts of different platforms (Soundcloud, Youtube, WeTransfer, Spotify…)? How do you divide up the listens? How do you know who listened to what? Who liked what? How do you create and share playlists? Even with a more suitable service like Dropbox, dealing with 2,000+ folders of 3 to 5 tracks each, which can’t be edited, would be an ordeal that seems at the very least complicated.

But above all, without Bridge, how can we make these tracks useful for audiovisual professionals? A music supervisor would have no use for a spreadsheet, a folder made up of 2000 sub-folders in the names of artists he doesn’t yet know: he needs a song manager that is collaborative, extremely detailed, and flexible.

Towards a new form of intermediation

The success of this listening session truly touched us. It actually foreshadows a new feature that will be introduced in the coming months.

Soon, we’ll enable audiovisual professionals, especially supervisors, to access the catalogs of the best labels, publishers and artists, in a single location (a “Hub”). They’ll be able to navigate through these catalogs as efficiently as possible, right up to being able to contact the rightful owner with a simple click.

And to round things off in style, we’ve compiled the best quotes from supervisors during this Listening Session!

See below if your track received a review! (click on the image to open the full document) 👇