The intersection of audio engineering and AI

MPA Creatives is the consultancy and strategic brand of Michael Pearson-Adams, a veteran of the music and broadcast industries who currently oversees product development for Voice ReGen at Waves Audio. Based in Brisbane, Australia, after a long tenure in the Miami art and radio scene, Pearson-Adams occupies a specific niche in the AI sector: the transition from traditional signal processing to generative audio restoration.

The core of the work involves the practical application of AI to solve legacy problems in sound recording. While much of the AI hype focuses on generating music from text prompts, Pearson-Adams emphasizes friction removal. This is the process of using neural networks to identify and reconstruct human speech that has been compromised by background noise, poor room acoustics, or technical failure. His work at Waves Audio with Voice ReGen is a primary example of this approach, moving beyond simple subtractive EQ or noise gates toward a model that understands the underlying structure of a human voice and can regenerate missing frequencies.

From Miami galleries to Brisbane

The background of the founder informs the company's perspective on AI. Pearson-Adams previously operated a fine art photography gallery in Miami and worked extensively in radio production—roles that prioritize the final aesthetic result over the technical tools used to get there. This history results in a product management philosophy that treats AI as a utility for efficiency rather than an end in itself. He argues that the "noise" in the AI sector is high, and the objective for businesses should be to identify where these tools can remove the most significant bottlenecks in a creative workflow.

At Waves Audio, Pearson-Adams manages tools that are used by professional audio engineers, podcasters, and broadcasters. These users are typically skeptical of tools that automate away their control. Consequently, the products he champions often focus on maintaining a high degree of transparency and manual oversight while using deep learning to handle the heavy lifting of audio restoration.

Market position and competition

MPA Creatives sits in a competitive environment that includes both legacy audio software giants and new AI-first startups. In the traditional corner are companies like iZotope (owned by Native Instruments), which has long set the standard for audio repair with its RX suite. In the AI-first corner are startups like Descript or ElevenLabs, which focus on synthetic voices and cloud-based editing.

Pearson-Adams differentiates his work by focusing on the professional plugin ecosystem. By integrating AI capabilities into the standard Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) environment through Waves, he caters to users who need professional-grade results without leaving their established production environments. The strategy is less about building a standalone "magic" button and more about enhancing the existing precision tools that professionals rely on for broadcast-quality sound. This focus on high-fidelity restoration rather than synthesis places the company at the critical entry point of the audio-to-data pipeline.