ST/STUDIO

Simon Taylor — creative technologist building original IP, audio products, generative tooling, and a cultural-foresight research practice. Half a billion streams as an artist. Six selected works, 2016 → 2026.

№ 00  ·  Selected Works 07 / 07
CategoryProjectYear
TRANSMEDIA IP SALIX 2026
MUSIC AI Generative Score System 2026
IDENTITY Burnley FC 2024
BRAND · AUDIO District Vision × New Balance 2024
FORECASTING The Next Five Aesthetic Movements 2026
COMPOSITION Music & Film Scoring 2026
BIO · CV About
BasedNew York
Window2016 → 2026
Open toFull-time · contract · consulting
Contactsimontaylorstudio@gmail.com

01 · SALIX

SALIX — a complete transmedia science-fiction universe set in the near future. A 65,000-word novel extended into a Unity VR build, with original music, Wwise spatial audio, ElevenLabs voice, and MidJourney-generated visuals.

A novel, 68-poem collection (Sub-Atomic Blues), with machine learning tools deployed throughout — ElevenLabs voice, MidJourney and Grok visual and video assets, and my own music score implemented in the build with Wwise spatial audio. Toby navigates offworld robotics, consciousness-reading machines, I-Ching decision-making devices, and an environment drawing on contemporary futuristic land art.

65k
Words · novel
68
Poems · Sub-Atomic Blues
200+
MidJourney assets
17 min
Vertical slice playable
Complete+ still 01
Complete+ · 01
Complete+ still 02
Complete+ · 02
Complete+ still 03
Complete+ · 03
System stack · proportional treemap
SALIX · build 0.4.2 · 7 components Cells sized by orchestration weight
Core · orchestrator 01 Unity 2022 LTS↳ orchestrates the other six XR runtime · URP · C# 10
Core · agents 02 HALOW Drones 12 agent archetypes
Core · narrative 03 Narrative Graph 240 nodes · LangGraph
Audio 04 Wwise Spatial · 32 buses · binaural panner
AI · voice 05 ElevenLabs Streaming voice v3
Data · memory 06 PLUS+ Memory Vector · pgvector
Data · state 07 Complete+ Save / load · JSON
Core · Audio · AI · Data — colour discipline · ink + paper + one accent Light Heavy

02 · Generative Score System

A rights-clean scoring system built from my own finished bounces: 159 source cues were cleaned into 580 prompt/audio pairs, then used as melody conditioning for MusicGen-Melody. The strongest outputs are short cinematic cues with phrase, contour, and texture inherited from the archive.

The breakthrough was not another training run; it was finding the right control surface. I compared a base MusicGen model, an earlier V2 LoRA adapter, and a melody-conditioned path using real Simon Taylor bounces as the input. The LoRA generated audio, but failed musically as glitch texture and one-shots; the melody-seed route produced the four cues presented here.

580
Clean WAV/TXT pairs
159
Eligible source bounces
16
Evaluation WAVs
4
Selected melody-seed cues
Visual evidence · artist-owned source archive
MusicGen source archive visual 04
MusicGen source archive visual 02
MusicGen source archive visual 03
MusicGen source archive visual 01
Audio evidence · generated live from artist-owned seeds
01Seed · Rome March 24

Piano Dark

Dark, sparse piano cue — phrase and contour inherited from an artist-owned piano bounce.

0:00
02Seed · Ghost Ships

Strings Melancholy

Slow cinematic strings with real harmonic movement — the most alive cue of the set.

0:00
03Seed · Loading Game In E

Electronic Warm

Warm electronic texture shaped by a real bounce rather than a text prompt alone.

0:00
04Seed · Vertical Lazarus

Trailer Build

A 28-second directional build — generated as a one-shot that resolves rather than loops.

0:00

Custom Web Audio players · real-time convolution reverb + seamless looping, generated on demand from a deployed MusicGen-Melody endpoint.

Pipeline
01

Catalogue audit

21,104 files scanned

Only audio inside Ableton Bounce/Bounces folders was allowed into the clean path.

Rights/source hygiene
02

Clean dataset

580 WAV/TXT pairs

Derived from 159 eligible source bounces across piano, strings, electronic, trailer, and related categories.

Artist-owned data
03

Melody seeds

Real Simon bounces

Each prompt was conditioned on an owned audio seed, giving the model phrase and contour instead of text-only texture.

Musical control
04

MusicGen-Melody

Seed-conditioned generation

The strongest path used the archive as a compositional input, not just a training set.

Winning path
05

Curated cues

4 selected outputs

Outputs were judged by listening: phrase behavior, harmonic intent, coherent instruments, idiom fit, and clean production.

Audio evidence
Model comparison
PathInputVerdictPortfolio decision
04 · Melody-seedMusicGen-Melody + real Simon bounces4 selected cuesPublic portfolio path
01 · Base mediumBase MusicGen-mediumBeat V2 LoRA 6/6Useful control; not the hero
02 · V2 LoRA smallmusicgen-small + r=32 LoRABroken / glitch texture / one-shotsRejected as creative output
03 · V3 LoRA mediumNo adapter attachedSkippedDeferred; melody-seed path was stronger
Hiring signal

The hiring signal is practical creative AI judgment: clean source rights, dataset hygiene, model comparison, musical evaluation, and a working path from catalogue bounces to usable generated cues. The failed LoRA path stays in the case study because it shows the system was judged by listening, not by loss curves.

The same training-data philosophy — rights-clean, author-owned, ML-captioned — underwrites the visual-culture forecast at 05 · The Next Five Aesthetic Movements, where the corpus is the CARI / Evan Collins archive and the eventual model output is per-movement SDXL LoRAs.

03 · Burnley FC

Led creative operations alongside the club's first creative director, artist Aitor Throup, for ALK Capital's new ownership of Burnley FC. Office redesign, the Save Football from VAR campaign, full digital shop audit, matchday redesign, and sponsor activations with AG1 and Castore.

2024
Launch year
12.4M
Save the Turf reach
6
Creative programmes
UK
Lancashire, England
Burnley FC · logo · Aitor Throup era
Burnley FC · logo · Aitor Throup era · 2024
Burnley FC — collage 01 Burnley FC — collage 02
2024 programme rollout · 6 campaigns
JFMA MJJA SOND Digital Shop Audit AG1 × Burnley Office Redesign Castore Kit Save the Turf 12.4M Matchday Redesign 2024 · ROLLOUT WINDOW PEAK REACH ↑
Programme window Save the Turf · 12.4M reach

04 · District Vision × New Balance

Recorded, assembled, and shipped District Vision's first paid audio product — a 16-part course introducing meditation and breathwork as tools for performance gains in distance running. Acquired by New Balance into an ongoing mental-health series.

Inspired by the on-retreat teachings of Esalen Institute founder Mike Murphy, the late Dr. Mike Spino, and George Mumford's The Mindful Athlete. Field-tested in upstate New York and London. Scripted and re-recorded with founder Max Vallot. Published via RSS with cover artwork from Comme des Garçons illustrator Filip Pagowski. Spino's principles — visualisation, breathwork, running on feeling — applied at the Boston Marathon for a personal best of 2:47:17.

16
Audio episodes
2
Seated + running modes
NB
Acquired into NB series
2:47:17
Boston PB · field-tested
District Vision × New Balance — Center for Inner Peace
District Vision × New Balance · Center for Inner Peace
District Vision × New Balance — collage 02 District Vision × New Balance — collage 01

05 · The Next Five Aesthetic Movements

A two-horizon taxonomy of where visual culture is moving next. Volume I (March 2026) names five movements for 2026–2031, derived from the Evan Collins / CARI corpus of 5,395 catalogued artefacts across 38 aesthetic categories. Volume II tests those propositions against 1,266 institutional exhibitions surveyed at seventy venues in London, New York, and Berlin, then extends the forecast forward to 2042.

The framework operates as a morphological forecast: not speculation, but structural inference. Five complementary lenses converge on five aesthetics that are not yet here but are, in the strict sense, already structurally inevitable. Every prediction is paired with a 2028 falsifiability test.

Vol. I · March 2026 The Next Five Aesthetic Movements Forecast of five movements for 2026 – 2031, derived from the Evan Collins / CARI corpus.
Vol. II · 2026 – 2032 The Archaeology of Attention 27,000-word companion thesis. Tests the forecast against 1,266 institutional exhibitions; written from 2032 looking back.

"The exhibition is undergoing a phase transition from visual consumption to somatic negotiation — from cinema to pharmacy."Archaeology of Attention · Part One

5,395
CARI artefacts catalogued
1,266
Institutional exhibitions
70
Venues · LON / NYC / BER
10 / 2042
Movements · forecast ceiling
Predictive track record · the Chisenhale pipeline
Artists detected at Chisenhale Gallery → canonised within 4–6 years
2010Hito Steyerl — Chisenhale solonow among the most-exhibited artists in the world
2012Helen Marten — Chisenhale soloTurner Prize · 2016
2012Lynette Yiadom-Boakye — ChisenhaleTurner Prize nominee · 2013
2018Lawrence Abu Hamdan — ChisenhaleTurner Prize · 2019

The Bible's 26-year coverage of Chisenhale Gallery (48 exhibitions, 1999 – 2025) functions as a futures index. The hit-rate is the proof: a forecasting system that has detected canonisation-bound artists 4 – 6 years before institutional consensus, repeatedly. The same archival logic underwrites Volume I's movement-level forecasts.

Editorial deep-dive · 7,500 words Read the full forecast → Methodology · five movement spreads (palette · typography · materials · composition) · evolutionary lineages · 5×5 interaction matrix · historical context · falsifiability verdict

06 · Music & Film Scoring

20 years composing — half a billion streams as a songwriter and producer. Commercial composition for Nike, Airbnb, Meta, and New Balance via leading music houses, including Airbnb Plus' global launch films in Paris, Mexico City, and Bath. Collaborated with Rihanna, Mark Ronson, LCD Soundsystem.

From commercial composition for global brand films to spatial audio, galleries, and immersive installations — this is the taste base behind the technology work.

20
Years composing
500M+
Streams
Mercury
Prize winner
4
Records on Universal
Selective works
2007 Golden Skans Songwriter 2007 Myths of the Near Future Songwriter 2010 Surfing the Void Songwriter 2014 Love Frequency Songwriter 2015 Terry Riley · In C 80th Birthday Guitarist 2016 Nicolas Jaar Sirens album Guitarist 2006 2026
Mercury Prize
2007 · Myths of the Near Future
#2 UK Album
Myths · official UK chart
1M+ Units Sold
3 albums · 2007 – 2014
Producers & collaborators
James Murphy · LCD Soundsystem James Ford · Simian Mobile Disco Erol Alkan The Chemical Brothers Ross Robinson

Commercial Composition Engagements

Nike · Airbnb · Meta · New Balance · District Vision · Audi · Boss

01

Commercial Work

Airbnb Plus · Christian Brecheis · Nike · Boss
Airbnb Plus — Paris
Airbnb Plus — Mexico City
Facebook — Your Voice
Christian Brecheis — Nike Worldwide
02

Film Work

Feature scores · short-film commissions
Jaron Albertin
Birds of Passage
September to Remember
Hawksbill Station
Roe Ethridge — Looking At You

Tools

Ableton Live · Pro Tools · Logic Pro · Spatial Audio · Field Recording · Modular Synthesis · Film Scoring · Vimeo

Mute
Click to unmute
God Party · Saam Farahmand · score by Simon Taylor

About

Simon Taylor — creative technologist building original IP, audio products, generative tooling, and a cultural-foresight research practice. Based in New York.

Simon Taylor is a creative technologist with a cultural legacy across music and art. His success as a lyricist was born from futurist worlds and systems-thinking, and that has carried into the world-building of SALIX: futurist systems, characters, artifacts, original music embedded in Unity builds using Wwise, video screens prototyped in Grok Imagine, and character voices built with ElevenLabs.

As self-taught guitarist and lyricist for Klaxons — three Universal albums, half a billion streams — he collaborated with Mark Ronson, Rihanna, LCD Soundsystem, Nicolas Jaar, and Terry Riley.

Maintains the Art Bible — a 27-year longitudinal record of 1,266 institutional exhibitions across London, New York, and Berlin — and authored The Next Five Aesthetic Movements (2026), a predictive taxonomy of emerging visual culture validated against named artist-pipeline hit rates (Steyerl, Marten, Yiadom-Boakye, Abu Hamdan).

45+
Countries
2:47
Marathon PB · Boston
Mercury
Prize · Klaxons
2016 → 2026
Window

US Green Card holder · UK citizen · Open to full-time roles, contracts, and consulting. Contact simontaylorstudio@gmail.com · Download CV (PDF).