Stefano Baldan

Folk musician · Audio developer · Researcher

Stefano Baldan

I make music, and I build the tools I wish I had while making it — songs on the Irish mandola, audio plugins for people who mix, and a decade of research into how sound works. All of it lives here.

Folk musician

One voice, one mandola, a room full of dancers.

I play balfolk — music for dancing — on the Irish mandola, accompanied by singing, stomping, and a little electroacoustic colour. Traditional tunes and originals of my own, rooted in the repertoire of the Venetian area I call home. A modern instrument with an ancient sound, poised between tradition and experiment.

Indie plugin maker

Audio plugins, built by a musician.

Duono widens mono with one knob and folds back to mono perfectly. Loko places a sound around the listener's head, and Chambro builds a reverb from a room's dimensions in metres. Each one tested in real sessions, by someone who has to live with the results.

DSP professional · Researcher

A decade spent asking how sound actually works.

My background is in Sound and Music Computing. On the EU project SkAT-VG I led the work on imitation-driven sound synthesis — designing sounds by voice and gesture — and built physically-informed models for the sounds of everyday objects and interactions. It's the signal-processing craft I still draw on every time I build an audio plugin.

About & contact

One person, a few crafts.

Italian by birth, based in Berlin. Software engineer by trade, with more than ten years across frontend development and Digital Signal Processing — and a musician for far longer than that. I care about accessibility, beautiful code, and sound that means something.