The music-making technology sector is an exciting space at the moment. Today we’ve got two announcements from startups operating in that world.

The first is BeatConnect, a company that has built a digital audio workstation (DAW) using gaming engine Unity.

Its new feature is called ‘Drops’ and enables people to explore one another’s music projects, then remix them and share that with the wider community to get feedback.

The second startup with an announcement this week is Japanese firm Dreamtonics, which has launched a product called Vocoflex. It’s a “real-time, AI-powered voice creation and transformation plugin” that lets musicians play with vocals.

That includes flipping between male and female vocals (or blending the two); creating backing vocals from leads and vice versa; and using different voices to create demos – something that could be useful for songwriters.

There’s also an audio watermarking feature to deter unethical use (think consent-less deepfakes) of the feature.