Music Tech Fest is a nomadic digital community that meets at physical gatherings which are acupuncture points for its ongoing activities. The MTF community prototypes new systems to challenge existing systems, always starting from music and the creative arts as a driving force for investigation into all areas of human activity, including science, industry and politics, and always resulting in a performance which allows to experience the effect of new technological systems on human beings. The MTF community manages to occupy spaces within academia, industry, nuclear reactors, trade fairs and concert halls, each time reinventing the relationships between people, space, tools and machines, and provoking new intellectual directions from a renewed space of common understanding.

Founded in London in 2012, Music Tech Fest has occupied various venues including the Barbican in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Microsoft Research NERD Labs in Cambridge MA, the Funkhaus in Berlin, Cankarjev Dom in Ljubljana, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. A giant creative laboratory, MTF connects artists, technologists and business in a vibrant environment. Unique collaborations, new works created on site, original research, premieres of future technology, and a visionary community, make each event an exciting landmark gathering. MTF is cross-genre, international, enriching, and inclusive.

By bringing together the MTF community and companies, Music Tech Fest enables both talent and businesses to test their ideas, expand and innovate rapidly. Experts and talent unite to receive support and distribution routes for their projects. MTF has been consistently feeding innovation policy directly from grass roots creative prototyping, achieving 53% women in a multi-gender 800-participant festival, enabling breakthrough accessibility applications to uncover new human talents, testing the future of work through creative experimentation, and resulting in multiple awards for art, innovation and entrepreneurship.

The Music Tech Fest ethos is underpinned by a Manifesto. In March 2014, amazing minds from the MTF community including researchers from Microsoft Research, MIT, Harvard, Oxford, McGill and Rutgers, gathered at Microsoft Research NERD Labs and created the international Manifesto for the Future of Music Technology Research which has since been undersigned by hundreds of supporters from a variety of backgrounds including science, arts, industry and politics.