

Engineering the Future of Media - Seattle Community Meetup
Join us for an evening of engineering talks, live demos, and networking with Qdrant, Adobe, Incantio, WellSaid, and the Seattle AI Film Festival.
Brought to you by the AI Collective, Code & Coffee, AI House, and Superoptimal.
About The Topic
Media is becoming machine-readable. Music, audio, and video are no longer just files to store and stream. They are signals that AI systems can search, understand, and help create.
That shift raises new engineering questions. How do you find a song by how it sounds instead of how it’s tagged? How do you make a huge music catalog discoverable for the people who need the right track? And how do you build generative tools for video and sound that keep creators in control?
We’re bringing together engineers, researchers, and builders working across audio search, music, and generative media to explore the systems powering the next era of content.
Expect real architectures, practical demos, honest trade-offs, and plenty of time to meet fellow builders. No sales pitches.
🗓️ Event Agenda
Doors open | Food, drinks & networking
Welcome from Superoptimal, Code and Coffee, AI Collective, and AI House
Talk 1 — Incantio: Finding the Right Track: AI-Powered Music Discovery
Talk 2 — Qdrant: Your Perfect Band: Auditory AI Discovery and Search
Talk 3 — Adobe: Creators in Control: Building Generative AI Tools for Video and Sound
Talk 4 — WellSaid: Samples vs. Synthesizers: AI Voice and Commercial Rights
Talk 5 — Seattle AI Film Festival (SAIFF): When Everyone is a Director: Cinematic Media and Its Impact
Networking, food & drinks
🎸 Talk 1: Finding the Right Track: AI-Powered Music Discovery for Independent Artists
Danny Newcomb - Incantio | LinkedIn
With independent artists accounting for a significant share of today's music market, finding the right track for an ad, film or video can still mean searching through massive catalogs manually. Danny Newcomb, a longtime Seattle musician turned founder, will explore how Incantio uses AI to make independent music searchable by mood, tempo and vocals, helping creators find the right sound while giving independent artists more opportunities to be discovered, licensed and fairly compensated.
🎧 Talk 2: Your Perfect Band: Auditory AI Discovery and Search
Neil Kanungo - Qdrant | LinkedIn
What makes us connect with a particular band or song often goes beyond titles and genres. It's the sound itself: the mood, texture and voice. Neil will explore how audio embeddings and vector search make it possible to discover music based on how it actually sounds, breaking down how similarity search and filtering work together, the engineering trade-offs involved, and how these technologies can power more personal music discovery experiences.
🎬 Talk 3: Creators in Control: Building Generative AI Tools for Video and Sound
Bryan Wang - Adobe | LinkedIn | Website
Generative AI is transforming how video and audio content is created, making once time-consuming creative processes more accessible. Bryan will take us inside Adobe Research's work on generative tools for video and sound, from creating soundtracks that match video to expanding stories through generative video. He'll explore how research translates into real-world products and the design and engineering decisions that keep creators in control while AI helps bring their ideas to life.
🎙️ Talk 4: Samples vs. Synthesizers: AI Voice and Commercial Rights
Benjamin Dorr - WellSaid | LinkedIn
We interact with AI voices every day, from our personal devices to customer service agents. But most creative production today is still completed with traditional voice acting talent or in-house recordings. Ben will discuss the levers of commercial quality, scale, and rights that drive how AI voiceover is used by creative professionals today, and the reasons why WellSaid has bet on real voice actors to guarantee intellectual property rights for creators in the future.
📽️ Talk 5: When Everyone is a Director: Cinematic Media and Its Impact on Tech
John Gauntt - Seattle AI Film Festival (SAIFF) | LinkedIn
Having judged more than 1,500 AI-generated films and XR experiences, John has witnessed firsthand how rapidly AI is transforming film, entertainment and creative production. Drawing on his experience co-founding the Seattle AI Film Festival, he'll explore why developments in cinematic media often signal broader technological shifts, and how the tools, skills and new ways of working emerging from the creative industries could shape the future of technology and the wider economy.
👋 Who Should Join?
Whether you’re working on audio or music AI, search and recommendations, generative video, creative tools, or media infrastructure, you’ll find plenty to dig into.
Come for the engineering insights. Stay for the food, drinks, and people. 🍛🍻
Space is limited, register early.
Who Are We
The AI Collective is a global non-profit building the human layer for the AI era. We unite 200,000+ leaders, builders, and stakeholders across 100+ forums worldwide to democratize the frontier, build trust, and coordinate how society navigates the rapid acceleration of technological progress.
Code & Coffee is a meetup for developers to make friends and grow, active in over 30 cities. 100% volunteer-led and volunteer-run, with 80,000+ devs and growing.
AI House is Seattle’s hub for AI founders, researchers, engineers, and investors. Founded by the AI2 Incubator and based at Pier 70 on the Seattle waterfront, it brings together a community, an incubator and capital to help build the next generation of AI-first companies.
Superoptimal runs technical meetups and workshops for AI engineers, bringing practitioners together around real production systems.