Mirta Gilson.
HPU alumna Mirta Gilson is the co-founder and chief operating officer of Audiotool. Today, the platform is a complete music production studio that opens in a web browser, available to anyone with an internet connection, and it has put professional music-making within reach of creators in nearly every country on earth. The promise is simple, and a little radical: the tools that once sat behind expensive software and locked studio doors now belong to everyone at once.
"Audiotool enables music production collaboratively. And it is free," Gilson said. "If you produce a song online with someone, everyone has the same access."
Long before Gilson and her team built a place for collaborators around the world to make music together, she was the one crossing oceans, boarding planes to find the people and places she had only imagined. Her story starts, as so many of the best ones do, with a young person who wanted to see everything.
Gilson grew up in Bonn, the Rhine River town that gave the world Beethoven and served for decades as the capital of West Germany. She went on to university in nearby Cologne. She carried a mixed inheritance from the start. Her father is Belgian, and she was raised speaking both French and German. She was, in her own telling, always interested in the world.
In her senior year of high school, she flew to the San Francisco Bay Area as an exchange student, living with a host family in Walnut Creek and, within days, learning the BART system well enough to make the region her own.
"It was so fascinating how different it was, making friends there," Gilson said. "I made friends with other exchange students from all of these different countries. I wanted to become a journalist or have a career in music. My first idea was to become a tour manager for a band. That was my dream job growing up."
The soundtrack in her ear was grunge, Nirvana loud in her headphones, and the experience did two things at once. It introduced her to the American way of life, and it surrounded her with an international one, a room full of teenagers from everywhere.
Back in Germany, an internship at a radio station gave her the advice that would shape everything that followed. The station chief told her to study whatever she was truly passionate about.
"Maybe I'll study American Studies, I thought, because I was interested in America," Gilson said. "It was a fascinating program because it spanned various topics that included literature, law, history, geography, art history, economics. It was a strong, rare, interdisciplinary program."
Early on, she learned that the degree would require a semester abroad in the U.S. She had already lived in the Bay Area, so this time she wanted somewhere different, somewhere even more diverse, a place where the world's cultures met.
One day, Gilson discovered an information session in Cologne. The presentation described how Hawaiʻi is at the crossroads of the Pacific, a place where cultures from around the globe converge in the middle of the ocean. HPU is placed right at that intersection.
Gilson had never set foot in the islands. In the second year of her degree, she got on a series of planes and arrived at night.
"I went to the beach in Waikiki, and it was unreal," Gilson said. "I couldn't wait for the sun to rise. To see paradise. It left a profound memory, my arrival in Hawaiʻi."
HPU welcomed her at the door. She still remembers the shape of those first days, the onboarding week, the orientation, a campus full of people from places she had only dreamed of visiting. The palm trees, the scent of the ocean, the flowers in the lei shops in Chinatown.
She lived in Waikiki, rode the bus, biked around the city, and took up surfing. In the classroom, she chose courses that would carry credit home: international communications, American literature, and a cultural anthropology class on the peoples of the Pacific that she found genuinely absorbing. Beyond the classroom, the university gave her a circle of friends who shared her sense of discovery.
"A lot of the people that became my friends or my roommates were in the MBA program or marine biology, and they too loved exploring the islands," Gilson said. "My roommate introduced me to scuba diving and I became certified, too. I wrote my master's thesis about tiki culture, and that allowed me to spend more time at the Bishop Museum, which I loved."
Then she returned to Cologne and finished her degree, carrying Hawaiʻi with her.
"One of the things that stayed with me was Hawaiʻi's incredible nature and music scene, and the way different cultures, genres, and traditions come together there," Gilson said. "Looking back, that openness to collaboration and new perspectives influenced me more than I realized and ultimately helped shape my career in media and music technology."
What she carried back was a conviction. She spent a year with the hip-hop archive at Harvard, one more place where music and history sat side by side. It became clearer that she wanted to work in the music business, and that meant getting into tech, and specifically into the startup world, where the energy was.
After working for an agency in Germany, she enrolled in a Global MBA program that was itself a lesson in crossing borders, a cohort that moved together through four universities in four countries: Cologne in Germany, Warsaw in Poland, Aix-en-Provence/Marseille in France, and Jacksonville in Florida.
Her first music-tech job, at a Cologne startup already connected by lineage to the company she runs today, ended when its funding did. So, she moved to Los Angeles, took a role at the agency GOOD Corps, and found her way into the city's community of entrepreneurs. She wanted to be around people who were innovating and building rather than complaining, and in Los Angeles she found them.
"I appreciated that ‘how-to-change-things-for-the-better’ mentality, the can-do spirit in L.A., and really cherished that experience," Gilson said.
Los Angeles became a chapter rather than a stop. She helped build media tech company Make.TV in the U.S., being in charge of partnerships. The company was sold to LTN Global, where she also worked for a couple years and built partnerships with cloud providers for the collaborative software.
Eventually, the pull of home and of music turned her back toward Germany, specifically Berlin. The city was international. It was big. It had history, and it had a music scene like nowhere else. Gilson continued working for Make.TV and later LTN Global and was also teaching a course on the Master's in Management for Creative Industries Program at bbw University of Applied Sciences, Berlin in Digital Skills and Methods for Culture and Creative Industries (CCI).
Then the world changed.
"There are many creative, online tools that became big during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies like Zoom, Canva, Figma. But an online tool like these had not yet happened for music," Gilson said. "Audiotool was a project I was still connected to since its first version was built as part of the HOBNOX platform, my first job after my MBA in 2007. It was always about community and collaboration. There were three million registered users on Audiotool at that time, and we talked to everyone in the industry, and we realized that there was an opportunity and we should start the company and build the next generation of collaborative music software."
They found funding, hired a new team, and spent three years designing an entirely new platform, the one that launched in May 2026. It is a music production studio that lives in a web browser, with no download, no install, more like a GoogleDocs for music creation. Open a tab, and a full digital audio workstation is waiting: synthesizers, drum machines, effects racks, a mixer, all of it free.
The team also rebuilt the platform's architecture for an era of artificial intelligence. Audiotool's open protocol, NEXUS, lets outside apps, AI tools, and creators plug into a live session and communicate with one another in real time, turning the studio into something closer to an open city than a closed program.
For Gilson, though, the technology has always been in service of something simpler.
"That is the part that speaks to me," she said. "Seeing people connect, collaborate, learn from and inspire each other."
The path, in the end, led back to where it started.
In December 2025, Gilson met HPU President John Gotanda and HPU Vice President of Advancement Maureen Silva for lunch in Berlin. They talked about AI and a changing workforce, and the ideas that came out of that conversation soon became real: a computer science capstone taught by HPU Associate Professor Mary Smith, Ed.D., where student teams built Audiotool apps, along with a fully online summer course tied to Audiotool's international "Let's Build!" hackathon series, which counts HPU among its partners alongside NYU, Berklee College of Music, Queen Mary University of London, Monash University and others.
"Today, what impresses me most about HPU is its continued commitment to preparing students for a rapidly changing world," Gilson said. "I was struck by how genuinely focused they are on understanding emerging technologies, global trends, and future career opportunities for students."
Students from across the University, coders and musicians, and communicators alike, are now building real music software on a platform with genuine industry reach, and earning academic credit while they do it. The same crossroads that once drew a German exchange student to the middle of the Pacific is now sending HPU students out into a global collaboration of Gilson's own making.
"HPU is so open to new ideas and experiences," says Gilson, "and that is exciting. HPU offers a rare combination of academic learning, cultural diversity, and global perspective. If you're looking for a university that combines academic education with international experience, cultural exchange, and a forward-looking perspective, in an incredibly beautiful place with an inspiring local community, HPU is a very special place to study."
It is advice drawn from her own life; one spent finding out what becomes possible when people from different places sit down to build something together.
"Happiness to me is creating something meaningful together, with other people," Gilson said. "Whether that's making music, building a company, launching a new initiative, or helping students discover opportunities they didn't know existed, the most rewarding moments are when people come together around a shared idea and create something that none of them could have achieved alone."
