Music to His Ears
“At the tender age of 3/I was hooked to a machine/Just to keep my mouth from spouting junk/They must have took me for a fool/When they chucked me out of school/’Cause the teacher knew I had the funk.”
--Thomas Dolby, from his song “Hyperactive!” (1983)
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Thomas Dolby has always been fascinated by the uncertain and shifting terrain between art and science.
It was Dolby the recording artist and producer who wrote the 1982 hit song “She Blinded Me With Science,” a love song with a goofy, synthesized technological sensibility that blasted high up the charts, making the British-born songwriter famous.
It was also Dolby the musician--with a fascination for old-time scientist-dreamers and the regalia of science--who recorded albums with names like “Astronauts & Heretics” and “Aliens Ate My Buick.”
Now Dolby the software company executive is concentrating on improving the sound of the emerging multimedia formats. If he’s successful, Dolby, 37, will help elevate music’s role in computer-based multimedia to the same position of importance it occupies in movies and television.
A longtime interest in computers led Dolby to experiment with the machines in his music through the 1970s and 1980s--first with a refrigerator-size PPG wave computer from Germany that he rewired to play drums, and later with Apple Macintoshes and the MIDI technology that’s now common in the music scene.
Ultimately, though, the available technology left him dissatisfied.
“For years I used computers in music, but it was generally off-the-peg software, and I was laboring under the illusion that it did something useful for me,” Dolby said. “I knew it could be done better. I tried to tell computer companies, but it fell on deaf ears.”
The desire to fill that technological void prompted Dolby in 1993 to form his own software company, Headspace Inc., of which he is president and chief executive. The San Francisco-based firm is developing technology that extends the ability of programmers to use music and sound in digital media, such as CD-ROM computer games and the Internet.
The firm’s technology, dubbed Rich Music Format, enables the intelligent integration of many music media formats, including MIDI files.
The first large-scale commercial test of Rich Music Format is just now underway: Headspace has licensed its technology to WebTV Networks Inc., the new online service that enables access to the Internet through ordinary televisions.
With his company, Dolby continues to work in new media. Headspace has designed sound and musical scores for such disparate applications as CD-ROM games, location-based entertainment ride films and the underwater-themed Century City restaurant Dive (owned by filmmaker Steven Spielberg and other movie business luminaries).
In addition to the four albums of his own work, Dolby has produced records for numerous other musicians, including Joni Mitchell and Ofra Haza, and has also scored films.
In 1993, Dolby created “The Virtual String Quartet,” a virtual reality installation based on Mozart’s Quartet No. 21 in D Major, that drew sold-out crowds when it played at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in New York. More recently, he composed music for the international multimedia production “The Gate to the Mind’s Eye,” a compilation of work from computer graphics and animation companies around the world.
For now, it is the interactive nature of new technology that Dolby sees as the critical factor in artistic and social innovation.
“Recorded music is slowing down somewhat in terms of its evolution as an art form,” he said. “That whole craft of massaging a single performance is something we’ve perfected. It could be that doesn’t have very far to evolve from here.
“Yet the interactive art forms, love them or hate them, are evolving very fast.”
Precisely what interactive art will become, however, remains unclear, Dolby said.
“New forms of art are going to have to emerge. There will have to be some reason that the public will choose to sit in front of a small screen with small speakers when it could be in big, plush theater.”
