PRISM

Performance Restoration & Isolated Structural Modeling

PRISM
Performance Restoration & Isolated Structural Modeling

Meet PRISM

PRISM evolves the practice of music production with a powerful new methodology for editing music and mixing sound. It reimagines the process from the user’s perspective, and reinvents it from a technical one. Yet it retains compatibility with existing tools and workflows, and preserves granular control. PRISM transitions DAWs to VAWs: Virtual Audio Workstations.

A computer rendering of the control room in a recording studio.

PRISM‘s “audio to MIDI to audio” gives users extraordinary new abilities. But it’s not a feature—it’s one of several underlying technologies used by PRISM to create the real magic. And bridge the gap between audio data and LLMs. Since 2013, PRISM has been used behind-the-scenes with dozens of iconic artists for whom performances are critical—ranging from Alice Cooper and Deep Purple, to Steve Vai and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Ten years later, PRISM is going public.
Year: 2020 Chad Wackerman & John Ferraro: Drums / Steve Morse & Blues Saraceno: Guitar / Sterling Ball: Bass

Meet the Scientist

Dr. Bill Evans seated in front of a mixing console with the native Belexes Virtual Audio Workstation interface in front of him.

Bill Evans performed his graduate work at Manchester Metropolitan University and Glasgow University. His PhD thesis established the methodology of Performance Restoration, a set of technologies and techniques to repair musical errors in recorded music, and restore performers’ original intentions. The Virtual Audio Workstation was introduced in Evans’ alternate thesis. Based on this research, he has engineered tracks for dozens of iconic artists, including with his own band, Flying Colors.

Bill Evans is a brilliant audio scientist who creates highly innovative and genuinely musical software solutions to some of recording’s most vexing issues.
Bob Ezrin
Producer/Legend
Bill Evans is one of those rare minds who bridges deep technical mastery with a true musical sensibility. His work as an audio scientist consistently pushes boundaries, not just solving problems but doing so in ways that respects the integrity of the music.
Jim Odom
Founder/CEO Emeritus, Presonus/Fender
Bill continues to make impossible things happen. PRISM converted my guitar parts to MIDI, and back to audio, preserving the performance perfectly. That just doesn't happen.
Steve Morse
7-time GRAMMY nominee, guitarist and songwriter for Deep Purple, Kansas, Dixie Dregs
Technology so easily robs us of originality, and diminishes our creativity. Bill's work has the extraordinary potential to make us more musical…and most notably, more human.
Peter Collins
Producer (Elton John, RUSH, Bon Jovi)

Foreseen Consequences

PRISM allows acoustic audio recordings to be edited as a series of independent, temporal events. Each event is a superposition of every possible performance of that note. By analysing the surrounding events, the context of any specific event can be sufficiently determined to enable the corresponding audio to be determined, and then synthesised.

A wide photograph of the Rosetta Stone. A wide photograph of the Rosetta Stone, modified to show the three representation of music within PRISM.

A subset of this process can be brought to Digital Audio Workstations. An encoding process analyses the recorded audio. It assigns semantic meaning and hierarchical representation to represent musical data, producing a MIDI track. And modelling data to represent the range of possible sounds, based on each note’s performance context. A PRISM-enabled Virtual Instrument then renders the sequence—or any version thereof—in real-time.

Year: 2020 Chad Wackerman & John Ferraro: Drums / Steve Morse & Blues Saraceno: Guitar / Sterling Ball: Bass

Foreseen Consequences

A problem manifests when raw audio is edited as MIDI. When notes are pulled apart, they expose Theoretical Audio—the parts of notes cut off by the next ones. PRISM generates the audio that would have existed, according to the performance parameters it predicts.

Split Personality
Year: 2025 “Apache” Audio Loop

PRISM divides acoustic recordings into performances and the sounds they made. Each can be edited independently using standard DAW tools (for processing MIDI and audio). Together, new classes of sound transformation are enabled to solve canonical problems with traditional music production.

A photo of a white, metal snare drum. An architectural-style diagram of a snare drum.

In this video, PRISM translates an audio loop to MIDI. Using features of PRISM’s Performer and Transformer system, the performance, instrumental physics, ambience, and other elements are edited separately. The DAW‘s native editing capabilities are complemented by PRISM‘s own unique transformations.

Selling Out

Hear PRISM on tracks with iconic artists, engineers and producers, engineered by Evans. Live songs are from the original audio—no overdubbing, re-recording or sample-layering.

Steve Vai ▪ Steve Morse ▪ Mike Portnoy ▪ Neal Morse ▪ Alice Cooper ▪ Jay Graydon ▪ David Foster ▪ Van Romaine ▪ Albert Lee ▪ Sterling Ball ▪ Joe Bonomassa ▪ Angel Vivaldi ▪ Chad Wackerman ▪ John Ferraro ▪ Marco Minneman ▪ Jim Cox ▪ Steve Lukather ▪ Crosby, Stills & Nash ▪ Peter Frampton ▪ Elvis Cosstello ▪ Peter Collins ▪ Ken Scott ▪ Bob Ezrin ▪ Michael Brauer ▪ Mark Neeham ▪ Howie Weinberg ▪ John Petrucci ▪ Robert Zemekis ▪ Deep Purple

PRISM Songs/Albums

27 Videos
Information
Information

Year: 2021

PRISM Usage: Steve’s guitar

Stay in the Loop

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Stay connected with PRISM, and get an inside look at the sessions from some of music’s most compelling artists. New technologies while they’re in the incubator. And fresh takes on how the science of music production affects us as engineers, producers, artists and humans.

Sound Evidence

It is not enough to create believable audio here. Longer and shorter notes are performed differently. And human audio perception is highly-tuned to the contextual interaction of simultaneous instruments. PRISM incorporates these elements into Theoretical Audio—independently of ambience.

Traditional GenAI creates believable sounds, but we need a higher standard to accurately convey performances. If the audio never existed, though, how do we know if PRISM gets it right?

Year: 2022 Marco Minnemann: Drums

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    CeltiphoniX

    Management + Publicity
    Go
    Bill is represented by Jeremiah Graham at Celtiphonix.

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    Stay connected with PRISM, and get an inside look at the sessions from some of music’s most compelling artists. New technologies while they’re in the incubator. And fresh takes on how the science of music production affects us as engineers, producers, artists and humans.