Valerio Velardo is an AI music engineer, entrepreneur, and consultant with nine years of experience building and scaling generative audio products, from founding and exiting Melodrive to leading MLOps at Utopia Music. He now runs Transparent Audio to build the trust and compliance layer for synthetic audio under emerging regulations, while advising startups through fixed-scope engagements that avoid common early-stage pitfalls. As founder of The Sound of AI and its accelerator, he has grown the largest AI-music community and produced widely used educational resources (including the DeepLearningForAudioWithPython repo). He combines academic rigor—a PhD in AI Music and an adjunct professorship at Pompeu Fabra—with hands-on engineering and product leadership across generative music, MIR, and real-time composition engines. Valerio is also active as a VC scout and author, blending systems thinking, music composition training, and practical lessons from costly mistakes to help teams ship reliable, auditable audio AI. Based in Malaga, he brings a rare mix of composer-level musical craft and production-grade ML architecture expertise.
9 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, AI Music, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, AI Music at The University of Huddersfield
InnovActionLab 2013
Conservatorio "L. Perosi"
Secondary school - Liceo Classico "D. Alighieri" (Latina, Italy)
Code and slides for the "Deep Learning (For Audio) With Python" course on TheSoundOfAI Youtube channel.
Role in this project:
ML Engineer / Data Scientist
Contributions:1 review, 20 commits, 1 PR in 7 months
Contributions summary:Valerio primarily contributed to the development of deep learning models for audio processing. They implemented and refined neural networks, including an artificial neuron, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) with backpropagation, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs-LSTMs) for music genre classification. The contributions span from basic neural network building blocks to complete model implementations, including data preprocessing and model training. The user also worked on solving overfitting by implementing regularization and dropout techniques.
Contributions:29 commits, 25 pushes, 1 branch in 3 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.
Request Free Trial
Valerio Velardo - AI Music Audio Consultant at Transparent Audio