Ableton Live and Designing for Authenticity — THU Sound & Music 2026 — Eric Carl

Last month I had the opportunity to speak at THU’s Sound & Music, an online event featuring sound and music professionals working in domains such as film and games. The talk and many others are currently available with a very reasonably priced ticket on the THU platform. Many thanks to the people at THU for the invitation and for putting such an inspiring event together!

THU were also kind enough to let me share my slides and speaker notes here. Putting the talk together was a fair challenge as there was a lot I wanted to cover. But with the help of friends and colleagues I was able to focus it on my work at Ableton and the characteristic of authenticity — a quality that has been very important in my design practice and that I felt was worth spreading further.

While the audience wasn’t necessarily other design practioners, I hope it can still be interesting as I touch on subjects like the design of Ableton Live, creative practice, and the values in my work. Onto the slides:

Hi, I’m Eric. Thanks to THU for the opportunity to speak. I’m a multidisciplinary designer — I’ve done graphic design, web design, illustration, and now digital product design. I work as a Principal Designer at Ableton, where we make creative tools for music makers.

We make Live, which is desktop software for making music.

We also make Push, which is a hardware controller for Live. Push also comes in a standalone version that runs Live on the hardware.

Note is our mobile music making app for iOS. Two of the Note designers, Pablo Sanchez and Oliver Sommerman, gave a talk about its design at Config 2024.

Move is our most recent hardware release, an ultra portable music making device.

We also have various websites for learning different aspects of music making — Learning Music, Learning Synths, and Tuning.

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I've been at Ableton for 10 years, working as an interface designer focused primarily on Live's instruments, audio effects, and other features. By design I mean what things look like and how they work.

Instruments and effects in Live are called “devices”. I’ve designed a lot of devices.

Today I’d like to talk about the design of Ableton Live. I’ll share some of the foundational thinking behind its design, and also walk through an example project that illustrates some of that thinking. I’d like to do that through a lens of authenticity, because I think that’s something about Live’s design that has been very important to me. It will be a design-focused talk, but I don’t think you have to be a designer to appreciate it. That’s what you can expect for the next 45 minutes.

What is Live? Live is desktop music making software for both studio use and live performance. It was originally made for live performance but evolved into a DAW (digital audio workstation). At 25 years old it has a lot of history. It’s been very influential, particularly on how electronic music is made.

My story starts before joining Ableton. I was a big fan of Live. As a music maker it was really empowering. As a designer I came to develop a strong appreciation for its design. It was a bit unconventional, but it really expanded my understanding of what good design was.

As it’s been around for so long it has changed in many ways, but in other ways it’s remained the same. I think part of that stability and continued relevance is due to some of the foundational thinking behind it.

For this first part I’d like to go back in time and explore that foundational design thinking. I should note that this is not an official record. Some of the ideas have been shared before, while some are my own observations and things that I find valueable personally.

It starts around the late 1990s with the founders, Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke, before the founding of Ableton.

They were making music together under the name Monolake. While composing and performing they developed software to meet their own needs.

The nature of their creative relationship is worth noting — in an interview Gerhard said: “I really like our dynamic of augmenting as your role, and reducing as my role. … One adds and the other subtracts.”

Because they were music makers themselves they were able to start creating something with a deep understanding of the needs of electronic musicians. This subject matter expertise, coming from the people responsible for the software, is one of the first characteristics that I think are strongly reflected in Live.

Early on there was more or less a clear vision of how they wanted it to be. One explicit characteristic was that it should be “like an instrument” — not software for making music, but software that turns your computer into something else, into an instrument.

One example of this was the choice to style the dialogues like Live, rather than like the operating system. This one could use an update.

It was also thought that ideally it...