2009 Dissertation at Fraunhofer IDMT

Gabriel Gatzsche took up his brother's idea a year later and made it the subject of his dissertation from 2005 to 2009. Together with his colleague Markus Mehnert, he first deals with the question of how to use music-theoretical tonal space models to recognize chords and keys in audio signals. The mentor of the work is Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg. The latter led the development of the MP3 standard. Through him, Markus Mehnert and Gabriel Gatzsche are inspired to look at music not only from a music-theoretical side but also from a perceptual-psychological and psychoacoustic perspective.

Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg supervised the preliminary development of Audanika as a doctoral supervisor (image source: Fraunhofer IDMT).

Während dieser Zeit arbeitete Gabriel am Fraunhofer IDMT am sogenannten Richtungsmischer, einem speziellen Mischpult, mit dem der Klang auf der Bregenzer Seebühne auf innovative Weise positioniert werden kann. This directional mixer already had two touch screens in 2005. Gabriel's task was to develop the software for the interface.

The directional mixer for the Seefestspiele Bregenz and Mörbisch inspired the development of a touchscreen musical instrument back in 2005.

Eines Abends bekam Gabriel wie durch einen Geistesblitz eine Idee: The idea was to map his brother's system into a touchscreen to create a whole new form of digital musical instrument. Und so kommt es bis 2009 zur Entwicklung des sogenannten »HarmonyPads«, eines schon relativ ausgereiften Prototyps der Audanika.

The first prototype of Audanika was called HarmonyPad and was realized on a JazzMutant Lemur.