The Science Museum opened its doors after hours on Halloween to celebrate the Year of the Engineer by inviting companies to join them for their Lates event. Based in the Information Age Gallery, which showcases 200 years of innovation in technology, the Abbey Road section told the story of invention to innovation at the studios through drop-in sessions for members of the public attending the event.

Abbey Road's long standing microphone technician, Lester Smith brought a selection of microphones to showcase at the event along with explanations on how microphones and recording technologies have evolved over the last 86 years at the studios. This was a rare opportunity for the audience to engage with Lester and ask questions about the microphones on display.

Abbey Road's Head of Audio Products, Mirek Stiles, who also heads up the Abbey Road Spatial Audio Forum, presented short reoccurring talks on the history of Spatial Audio at the studios and how sound recording has progressed from mono - to stereo - to spatial audio, and how the studios are currently researching and experimenting with new recording techniques and equipment.

For a glimpse into the future of innovation in music technology, Abbey Road Innovation Manager, Karim Fanous presented three startup companies from Abbey Road Red's music-tech incubator programme, the first of its kind in Europe. Japanese company COTODAMA showcased their intelligent lyric visualisation technology with their Lyric Speaker and the soon-to-be released Lyric Speaker Canvas, whilst Vochlea Music presented their vocal recognition music creation tool for the public to try. Humtap also presented their iOS app which uses AI technology to create songs from the users' humming and tapping. Members of the public were free to drop-in and try the tech for themselves and leave with their own tracks created with the Humtap app. The event was organised by Hash Riaz to provide a rare opportunity for the public to engage with the Abbey Road team, learn more about Abbey Roads rich history of innovation and experience some of the latest innovations in music technology with Abbey Road Red.