Alejandro Koretzky, a MCL alumnus, is currently working on his own start-up company named Tunesplit. We had an interview as well as a friendly conversation with him.
Alejandro came from Argentina in 2013 to pursue a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, specializing in multimedia and creative technologies. His focus is on signal processing and machine learning.
During his study, he developed a strong interest in source separation and decided to conduct research in this field. Being a musician (both singer and writer), Alejandro became interested in developing an algorithm that automatically decomposes audio according to its sources (e.g. guitar, keyboard, singer, etc.). This would give the user the ability to access and manipulate the individual sources within an audio mix, and thus, personalize the music listening experience. To make it convenient for the users, this splitting process needs to be conducted in real time. In order to make his idea come true, Alejandro took Directed Research with Professor Kuo, who not only supervised him in research but also helped him establish connections with other people.
Starting from the first prototype, an iPhone app, Alejandro converted his idea to a real product and entered the battlefield of business as well. His team was selected by the Viterbi Startup Garage, a program which provides support in funding, space, strategic, and financial resources. Currently, he is focusing on connecting his product with Spotify.
Reflecting on his experiences as a member of MCL, Alejandro says he is very proud of the lab. He believes it is not only a great place for conducting research, but also a great place to connect with other people and learn about other research projects. He also would like to share the following advice with us and other students. He believes that students should focus on enhancing their skills and broadening their knowledge of various fields, instead of focusing only on their grades. Furthermore, he believes that we should not choose easy courses; instead, he believes we should take courses that we are passionate about, because it will be very rewarding in the future.
We would like to thank Alejandro for his valuable advice and wish him great success.
For more information, please refer to the following links:
Official website: http://www.tunesplit.com
Demo: http://demo.tunesplit.co
