Video: André Michelle – Why You Should Do It Anyway!

I’ve known André since the Flashforum days and it was genuinely wonderful to finally have him on the beyond tellerrand stage. As I wrote in his speaker introduction, André has spent three decades building tools that make music accessible to everyone and this talk is the full story of how that happened, why it almost didn’t and why he kept going anyway.

"Why You Should Do It Anyway!" is part origin story, part hard-won lesson and part live demo. It starts in the 90s with a broke techno DJ who taught himself Flash because it was the closest thing to the music studio he had in his head. It moves through years of hacking audio out of a platform that was never designed for it. Generating samples from byte arrays, building Roland 909 emulations, sequencing tones in a browser years before the Web Audio API existed.

Then it becomes something else: 16 years at Audiotool, what it felt like to pour everything into something and then lose control of it, and how spite – yes, spite – can be a perfectly good fuel for starting over.

What I find most valuable in this talk is how honest André is about his own poor judgment. He doesn’t blame the people who terminated his contract. He blames himself for not seeing it coming. That kind of self-awareness is rare on stage and it makes everything he says about openDAW feel earned rather than promotional.

And openDAW is bloody impressive. No sign-ups. No cookie banners. No cloud lock-in. Half a megabyte, boots in 200 milliseconds, runs on any device including a school computer. André has been working with music teachers and professors to shape it and next semester it will be the software of choice at the Cologne University of Music and Dance. The live demo at the end with Bastian Allgeier playing guitar through openDAW’s effects chain at six milliseconds latency is a lovely way to end a talk about belief in what the browser can do.

There is a line in here I keep thinking about: "If everybody owns it, nobody can steal it." Simple. And true!

More information about André Michelle on his beyond tellerrand speaker profile page.

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