And with a choice anecdote this is how you begin your memoir. You find yourself in the heat of the nevada desert desperately trying to communicate over a phone line, a phone booth. You remember phone booths . Are battling off a fire ants and you had just written a song for someone and you are having a hard time getting through to this individual or tell us the story. So, this was the morning after a gig we did at the greek theatre in los angeles and backstage at the Greek Theater was none other than Michael Jackson and he said to me, to my astonishment he knew the names of some of my songs and asked me if i had any extra songs knocking around and im like sure i do, michael. He said yet anything like hyperactive. It so happens i have something exactly like hyperactive and he said when can i hear it and i said i can make a demo in the back of my tour bus and i can send it to you from my personal computer and i had a personal computer from radioshack, you know one of those things with the little screen and acoustic couplers, which were these rubber pads that you would plunder receiver into. I spent half the night making a demo in the back of my tour bus and i got the driver to pull over by the side of the road in a cloud of dust at a phone booth halfway to salt lake city. Armed with my acoustic cups and radioshack computer i attempted to send this file over a phone line to Michael Jackson at the record plant in los angeles. I remember i was wearing corduroy trousers in the pockets were bulging with quarters and i camp pumping them in and i had a hard time getting the file to transfer, 1984 or Something Like that. Michael said why dont you do it the oldfashioned way and see me that tune and i thought what have i gotten myself into, so i took a deep breath and started banging on the microphone like making up the words as i go along in the time honored fashion and there was this silence at the end of the line and finally, he said anything else. [laughter] your beginnings in music were humble. The very first synthesizer you can cross because quite frankly that technology was expensive, was actually in a dumpster. Yeah, this is the winter of discontent in london where there were various strikes going on including a garbage strike and you could find the most Amazing Things stacked up on street corners and in dumpsters and it was in one such dumpster that i found a Circuit Board which as it turned out was the guts of machine called a transcendent 2000 and i took it home and sold it put it together and it was my first ever synthesizer. Had no keyboard, mind you. You made noises by turning knobs , but i was happy as a clam. I find one of the anecdotes in book especially interesting and may be illuminating. You came it from a family of academics and maybe they were suspicious of this interest in the music as a profession, but the very first time his family saw him perform was actually on a show in the uk called top of the pops, which was like Ed Sullivan Ed Sullivan for as a decade before, big show and you are performing a song you had written called new toy which became quite a hit. That was the first time your family saw you perform. Probably the first time they took me seriously, actually. My father and his father and his father were all cambridge professors and my mother taught algebra and statistics and i am the youngest of six kids and they were all academics in one level or another, so i was the black sheep of the family leaving school at 16 to work in a fruit and vegetable shop to sort of feed my night time punk rock habits, so during the day i worked in this store and at night i would see the sex pistols and the clash and at that time everyone was kind of a punk. If you didnt have long hair and flared trousers you must be a punk rocker. Elvis costello was a punk and the police etc. And i saw all of them in little pubs where he lived in london. Fantastic time, but my parents were waiting for me to get a proper job and i think the night they finally saw me on top of the pops along with maybe a third of the uk watching at that moment i think was the first time they really knew i was not bluffing and was really going to be a career i would pursue. Your initial thrust toward pop success did not work out exactly as planned and you find yourself busting in the parisian metro, but uk phone call from one make jones in your thinking the clash is reaching out to me. Not so much. Turned out to be the other mick jones, the one that played in foreigner, the american a or rock group, so i was a bit disappointed to be honest. Sorry, next. I thought did they have like something called cold as ice or Something Like that . They said, could i go to get on the next plane to new york and do some session keyboard playing on foreigner fall, their latest album and i didnt really want to go, actually. I thought this was just temporary and any minute i would get signed up by record label and i would make my own stuff. My friends, joe that i bust with said if you dont really want to go why dont you just quote them the [bleep] price. Sorry, cameras. They said yes, so it sort of became a model of mine that i return to many times over the years when i didnt really want to go anywhere. It was exception because i couldnt wait to come to annapolis. Well, they paid and you provided synthesizers and warned up some of these foreigner tracks that became quite famous in their successful. With that money you were able to then focus on your thing and you were able to record that first record, the golden age of wireless, which sold modestly. If im not back stake in it was on its way to number one in guatemala and were it not for other unfortunate coup detat in mina got there. You were a fan of silent movies. I know you love Buster Keaton and artists like that and when this new thing called mtv began to pop you are interested and you began to think, well, maybe i could provide some things for this and that really began the ascent of thomas dolby. Yes, so my album had come out and been very well reviewed and sold about three copies and it wasnt getting much radio play in the us and radio play was really the key to the charge of the usa and counted towards the billboard charts and really was proportionate to sales as well. Com. Mtv came along and for the first time in major cities, cool people were staying at home i saturday night to watch mtv videos instead of going out to gigs and clubs, so mtv was very influential and i could see this and i could see that people that were successful with mtv were starting to get radio play as a result and would end up on the charts. A lot of the videos on mtv were not that inspiring. I always had this sort of hankering to be a silent movie star by keaton or lloyd r chapman or whatever and part of that was because this is 1981, you know, the pentup front men of the day where people like adamant and staying in i didnt feel i was going to compete in the handsome boys stakes, so i might as well and shot launch onto this image that was after all part of my gene pool. So, i made a video, which started out with a storyboard and i thought if im going to be viewed as a scientist i will be a hip scientist, so i need like a japanese Lab Assistant and a vintage motorcycle with a sidecar and i created this parallel life for myself and i wrote the storyboard in which this character went to this the many asylum and there was a sinister operation featuring this Mad Professor psychiatrist type. I wrote the storyboard and took it to my record label and begged them to give me the budget to write and direct this video for myself and they said this is great, but thomas, wheres the song and i said i will bring in and on monday morning. I had the weekend to write a song and i had a title, she blinded me with science, but i didnt really have a song, so i went to my home studio and wrote it and took it in on monday morning. Im detecting a certain pattern here. Yeah. Sure, i have the song. I will be right back and of course it became a breakthrough top five hit the United States and was then added to the golden age of wireless. The first to not have that song, but it enabled album to chart and not hyperactive was a followup single a couple of years later and at least by my estimation it should have been a top 10 hit the us and did very well in the uk, but here you are perhaps for the first time given a real hard look at the nature of the Music Industry with all of its well at times could be dirty and vindictive pitocin bit about what happened to hyperactive here in the us . When you have a hit record everyone slaps each other on the back and you go out and celebrate and you from artist sam. You assume it was because it was a great song a great performance and i got i deserved when a song flops, you immediately start to do a postmortem and analyze what went wrong. As i dug into the reasons that possibly hyperactive had not done so well, i started to come facetoface with some of the sort of grim reality of the Music Industry when i saw what hadnt gone right for that single and it was depressing to me, quite frankly and i probably overstepped a mark that artists are expected not to cross. Generally, when that happens they will just commiserate with you and say when are you going back into the studio to make us more hits and we will do better next time, but i dug into it and began to realize that just as all the ducks had been in a row, several things went wrong with hyperactive. Including a lot of sort of political wrangling between the Record Companies and a rather strange Organization Called the network. Now, the network was populated with guys who in theory were radio experts, so they were independent consultants at a Record Company would go to in order to figure out which song often out one to pick to go on the radio whether he needed editing, what sort of segment of the radio world they should approach with the song. Basically, without the network you couldnt have a hit record because in fact what was happening was made indirectly controlled what actually got played on the radio and there are a lot of brown envelopes changing hands and so on and it was really upsetting to find this out because when you find out Something Like that you realize maybe it wasnt on the merits of my music or my words or my performance that the other one was a hit in this one was it maybe it was just the right palms got greased, so i sorted to become disillusioned with the Music Industry and started looking elsewhere. However, with that said this success, this pop hit it with she me with science all got you noticed in a lotto quarters and you were able to do some Amazing Things during the 80s. Amazingly tacky. For example you are invited to play live aid with david bowie. You are asked to two connect musically with Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock and asked to perform at the wall, the berlin wall when roger waters brought that pink floyd masterpiece back. You work returning mitchell, jerry garcia and bob weir, this line of legends and that must have been enormously satisfying. Yeah, these are the legends of my teen years and i dont know about you guys, but i still have a certain adulation for the stuff i loved when i was 15, which i find hard to replicate with any new music today and its not necessarily judgment on the music. I just think at that age we are especially influential double implausible, so it wasnt credibly clattering to attract the attention of some of my heroes and to get to play with them and see what i could do to enhance what they do. For example, Joni Mitchell who i had adored since i was maybe 12 or 13 i think blue was the first album i bought with my own pocket money. She had had a succession of music collaborators like tom scott and so on who had sort of flavored an era of her work, her music and if so when i got invited to work with her i pictured myself as being the flavor of the hopefully the decayed decade and it turned out to be more like three months we didnt really click am unfortunately. But, she was astonishing to be around, had endless unbelievable stories, i mean, true, but unbelievable about when she was living in a cave on a greek island writing carry and stuff like or the night that miles davis passed out in a paris hotel suite with his hand gripped around her ankle and she had to call the house detective to comment prior his bony fingers up her ankle. So, she was great to be around and fabulous artist and completely deserves the accolades she has had from generations of singer songwriters that followed in her footsteps. So, yeah, like you say it was really very gratifying to be able to work with people like that. You have to tell the story of explaining to georgia clinton that he in fact was not about to be abducted by the mothership connection that it was actually bioluminescence. I coproduced songs on georges album, some of my best jokes our friends. We did this in miami and what george would do on his days off would go fishing and charter a fishing boat he went to the fishing like a big boat and we would go miles out and you could still see the skyscrapers of miami behind you. It was this his way to relax and he would play bass just blasters and every now and then the captain would yell fish on and he would pitch a button and this electric fishing rod would start an identity was very sportsmanlike and i thought at least if you did it from a kayak or sportfishing, i have no idea. But, george told me about a night that he went out into the Bermuda Triangle with Bootsy Collins in a chartered fishing boat and they got enveloped by a silver cloud and globs of mercury were falling out of the sky and spattering on the deck and they were convinced of that this was an attempted alien abduction and the skipper of the boat was drunk and locked himself in the engine room and they had to navigate their way back to land after having had this Close Encounter pure i said yeah, george, have you ever heard of bioluminescence and he said was that and i said its like these organisms that live in the seat that absorb the light during the day and at night they glow and sometimes you see a trail of them and those on the boat and it looks eerie. He said oh, what about the silver clouds and i said if you have a full moon it would appear you are in the midst of a silver cloud and couple that with the globs of green luminescence on the deck and it would be given i dont know what you are on, but i can see that would be a pretty weird experience and he said you ate no fun, man. [laughter] you blighted him with science you continue to make records throughout the 80s, brilliant albums, but there was also a sense that the music biz, you are beginning to be attracted to what was happening north in california, Silicon Valley. You are using a lot of the technology coming out of their, synthesizers are not sort of thing and there was a natural affinity. Tell us how you make that transition to Silicon Valley . As you say, i had been using software and hardware that had come out of Silicon Valley and in the early days of my music i was using mostly custom kits like the Circuit Board from the transcend or 2000, but as time went on the equipment that my fans were using was sort of converged with what i was using to make it on, so by the late 80 i had a apple mac and a lot of that my audience was out there with an apple mac as well and the software was becoming cheaper and more freely available and yet it did not always do what i wanted it to, so i would often go to Silicon Valley and consult with companies and i would feature make feature request, which if i was lucky six months later the software that included my request, so i sort of got bitten by the bug. Simultaneously i was getting disillusioned with the Music Industry and getting really excited with what was going on in Silicon Valley and remember, this was the early days of the internet. I took a look at that and thought once we are connected, why cant i just send my files from my apple mac via the internet to your apple mac and suddenly we bypass the Music Industry that i was so disillusioned with and i have disconnected directly with my audience. I was kind of right about that. I was just off by about 15 years or Something Like that, but i saw no reason why this should it change overnight and i was really more excited about that, so went to Silicon Valley and for my own Software Company cnet which was eventually called beatnik. Yeah, beatnik was originally our product and it was designed to make webpages so horrified so instead of just sauna fied so instead of clicking around on the web you made music as you went in in order to do this you had to have a synthesizer that worked in software, not a synthesizer with a keyboard and knobs, but just a chunk of code that would download in your webpage and a trigger these sounds and so that was our technology and through much of the 90s we were pushing this technology and getting millions of downloads and throwing big parties and press releases and we had a revenue web 0 billion. [laughter] at this beatnik synthesizer very small and efficient and eventually it would find a home inside of about 2 billion cell phones worldwide. Came about in a strange way and a lot of people assume when you have a tech Success Story that some genius was in a garage in cupertino and a light bulb popped, but it was more arbitrary than that. We have been struggling in the. Com. World and we created a very small and Efficient Software synthesizer while other synthesizers on the market were growing and growing and getting more powerful as processors got more foul powerful, so in about 1998 the Worlds Largest cell phone manufacturer in finland was looking for a way to do ring tones and their phones. They had seen some japanese phones coming out that had a yamaha many chip that were able to play some ringtones, but but they didnt want to have the expense and liability of a dedicated hardware chip in each unit, so they look for a Software Synthesizer that was small and efficient enough to play ring tones and their phones and we already had the only solution, so in about 98 we set engineers to finland to see if they could Port Technology to the mass market phones and the long and short of it was that they licensed it and embedded in their phones and ship several hundred million of them and saved beatniks bacon because we would have gone the way of many other businesses if it were not for this one deal. You mentioned ringtones and needed from another Company Called retro ring tones which i think in some measure was the payoff for all of this hardworking Silicon Valley and theres an interesting story about the ring tone phenomenon because you may remember 10, 12, 13 years ago kids were willing to spend 2. 50 on a rather poor sounding slice of a song of a pop song, but not 99 cents for the actual song. You make a interesting point about that. And in the music could not figure this out. They were trying to launch platforms to sell music for 99 cents and they were failing dismally. They couldnt work out why ring tones like this substandard rendition of a hit were selling by the bucket load for two and half bucks a pop and it really hit me one Christmas Season when i was shopping with my family in a mall in Northern California and i was sort of burnt out by this and i was sitting on a bench and there was a group of kids across the way in front of like a sports store and someones phone went off and it was eminem song. Hes a wrapper, like a version of one of the songs, but at the moment i realized this teenager like if a phones going to go off in the midst of her friends its important that its the right ringtone search same way as the logo on her sneakers has to be that logo because even though she could have saved 20 bucks and got a knock off, the brand is important. So, realized that the two half bucks wasnt coming from her music budget because she has no music budget. She can get all the music in the world she wants for free on the internet, but she does have a fashion budget like a close budget and thats where the 2. 50 came from and thats what the Music Industry could understand. They could market their hand around that and retro ring tones did and that was a name nice payoff for you. There was a lot of highs and lows during this time. I mean, really you were one of the first to bring sound to the internet period, if im not mistaken. It was a seven up campaign with that jamaican guy, dont you feel good do you remember that one . You guys push that in the technologist at the time also couldnt quite get their head around why would you want sound on the internet. They didnt even want speakers in the computers, really. They said to me that speakers would annoy the guy in the next cubicle while hes crunching numbers on his spreadsheet. They sought as a distraction and the only tech company that took sound of music seriously where apple. Everyone viewed them as sort of hippie dreamers, investors would come to my office and take thomas, get the max off the desktop because if we see that we think this guys just a dreamer, fantasist. Fastforward 20 years and whos the Biggest Company in the the world and what was their killer app . You also got involved in the ted talks early on especially after it left the kind of rare for verified era of Silicon Valley became a nonprofit. In fact, you are the musical director for about a dozen years, which may be moves you a little closer to the idea of the family business. We will get to that point in a moment, but there was a really unique period and i can to discredit as sprinkling fairy dust on the proceedings. I gave my first ted talk in 1992 with this Software Engine i had created and i saw the power of it. Ted was a fantastic thing, but it was sort of a bit elitist, a bit of a boys club, you had to know someone to get in and pay thousands of dollars and we would listen to talks and go off and drive a concept car around a racetrack or get flown around monterey bay or have a fantastic cartel party at the aquarium, soap it was Business People in Silicon Valley pc and so on, so Chris Anderson who i already knew as a bridge had become a success as a magazine editor. He had a magazine called business 2. 0 in Silicon Valley at the time. He took over the conference and made it his mission to turn it from a very closed the door for profits event into a nonprofit and to attempt to share intellectual capital of of ted with the world in a way without diluting the desirability of being there at the event, so i helped chris out with some of the staging and music and so on and if you spend four or five days at ted the intellectual stimulation is so overpowering sometimes that its very refreshing to have a scottish folk singer go off and seem you for 15 minutes, so my job was to bring in musicians and create custom music for each session. You did just that creating music for the panels and brought in people like david byrne and paul simon and many others. You wanted people that would stick around for four days and rub shoulders with astronauts and coral reef explorers and genetic physicist and things like that. I cant help but think there is a direct link between ted and that intellectual stimulation and coupling with music, which is something you came from. And your current tenure as a Johns Hopkins university professor. Not tenure [laughter] your current position. Gap, so i got invited over three years ago to lecture at Johns Hopkins university in baltimore, and to help them launch a new film center, so im in the Film Department currently and i teach film scoring two students both from Johns Hopkins and micah, the local arts school. I have been doing that for two and half years. Im switching as of the fall to create a new program at the peabody conservative jury which is also by Johns Hopkins and its a program for new media meaning film, tv and also Computer Games and Virtual Reality and so on, eeg, Music Therapy and things like that and i was very intrigued by this opportunity and felt i had reach a time in my life where i had sort of run out of new fields to barge my way into and it was maybe time to give a bit back and hope some of that experience could rub off on a new generation of kids. On top of which my wife is from new york. She had some her family had some Health Issues and she wanted to be close to them, so it made sense for us to move to baltimore and its been a big success and we love it there. You told me six, seven months ago that one of the reasons he wanted to take this position is because you could perhaps well, for example put them in a room and lock out their cell phones. They actually have to think about problems in a way that you and i did coming up. Its different. Without our google brain it becomes a different world. I also liked about what you said about how teaching music and imparting some of this wisdom is fulfilling on a very different level. If you would comment on that. One of the things i see with my students is that when they encounter problems or roadblocks there is a you keypresses away from a solution. You google it, you download the user manual am a you post a message in a form, go on youtube and find someone that solve the problem for you, so they dont really expect to encounter any hurdles, really. But come i look back at my career and realize all of the most Creative Things ive been able to achieve have been because i hit a roadblock and i had to sort of circum navigate and it was really off the beat pass. You there was no manual in terms of making videos for mtv. Very few had done it, in terms of bringing found to the internet, no one had done it. I mean, i screwed up at times as well, but sometimes even the screwups resulted in interesting artifacts and if you are alert to that and you have a good sort of nose for it you can uncover some real gems and i think its especially valid now for anyone thats creative because, although, we have this Fabulous Software on our computers, our phones, 99cent apps that do more than my 100,000dollar fair light did in 1992, its fantastic. The downside is everyone else in the room, in fact, everyone in the state, in fact everyone across the whole planet has access to that same 99 set app, so theres a tendency for things to be fondle funneled into a mediocre groundbreaking is generic and thats poison for an artist. When you are in an overpopulated fuel the like that, its deadly and people get defensive and they get formulaic and its the antithesis of originality and great art. Im about to open up the floor to questions if anyone wants to ask thomas dolby a question or two, the first dimensional p playbook and my guess is a lot of these people will not be writing their own memoir or autobiography. Did anyone reach out to you to fix themselves . Yet, actually. My first draft i gave to have a dozen people that i trusted to give me good input and most of them are mentioned in the book and the first thing they wanted to do was fix themselves in the book, but it was interesting people at different memories and recalls of the city that i realized many of the stories in the book, they are stories ive told verbally either in a social setting or an interview like this or whatever and do so your memory almost becomes solidified with the evolution of the story, you know, as you get better at telling it over the years. Sometimes these are people that were actually there and they go you know, i have read before where you say thats the way it happened and thomas, thats not the way it happened, which thats a function of memory. You see this in court cases, you know . Like someone will be on the stand with their hand on the bible and say a green truck came out of the driveway and turned left and then they show the video and its a red truck that turned right. Was anyone ever able to provide evidence contrary to your memory . I dont think so, particularly. I mean, my manager in the 80s was extremely anal and kept every file in every meeting notes going back to 1980 and he still hasnt. Why i dont know. He cant let it go. Hes a quarter, i guess. When i was writing the first draft, i could look at the dates and things on the internet, but if there was a date or a name i didnt know it would fill something in and i thought randy will set me right. I sent my first draft to andy and i came back with 139 notes in the margin and his comments got more and more abusive as time went on. In the beginning they were quite polite, but in the end it was like where do you get this crap. It became apparent to me that he hit reply and send it back to me knowing full well i might never talk to him again, but actually i was very grateful to be put right about many of those things. Any regrets about something you included or didnt include in this book . Well, i mean, i havent had any lawsuits yet. A lower your win over it and picked out a few things and sort of said the name of one person he said you might want to change this to a more generic name because shes very litigious and she will come after you, so you will see a hollywood divas mentioned in the book and thats the only name i give. This is something i asked a couple years ago. Whether or not you were writing new music and at the time you said things are kind of bubbling up and sometimes i will be in the shower and the melody will strike me. Are you making music . Quite little. I tended to work when there is sort of a sucking sound i mean going back to the video thing, i mean, a process i use when im creating is i sort of picture the moment at which the public will experience this thing on creating and i sort of work backwards from that, so if im writing a song for example i visualize a stage, empty spot like a grand piano and a guy walks onto the stage and sits himself a grand piano and starts to play and sing. What is it sound like . I just imagine that sound, the intro, he starts to sing. Sort of reverse engineer that moment and work backwards from there. So, if there isnt that sucking sound than i tend to be not so productive. Right now i have no record label i have no to her lined up. Its not like theres a vast global audience that is pressurizing me to come out with a new album im not done with music by any chance. There will be more, but at this moment in time there are other things that thrill me more including the teaching, including writing. You know, i wrote this book having never publish anything before other than the blog. I had a blast doing it and i want to do more of that and i really enjoy anything that i suck at is really challenging and stimulating to me. What do you suck at . Well, still writing, actually i mean, writing a memoir is one thing i beg to differ. Its a fine piece of work. My next one will be fiction and thats really hard. Folks come i would like to open the floor to questions. I think you might need to grab the microphone in the middle, there were just walk up to the microphone. I really like your point towards the end about mediocrity of content being produced and as a result of the technology available. I wonder, what do you say to your students who are trying to produce content music or whatever . Why would they why do they do that . Im a musician and technology person. Why do they why create. Why created all . When there is such a sea of mediocre stuff and social media. Everyone has to answer that question for themselves. There is a flow, constant flow of new talent coming forward took there are people on this planet to make great music and they there will be wave after wave, but we may go through phases of a golden age or a rather sparse period, where theres not much exciting music being made and sometimes that relates to technology. Sometimes it relates to politics works sometimes it relates to other areas that have grabbed the publics interest in a more than music. A lot of young people today spend their time playing video games or are in social networks are watching reality tv and when i was a kid there wasnt much to do other than wait for the new grateful dead album to come out or see if you could save enough money to go see the almond brothers, you know . We were obsessed with those things and we would drive together with other kids that felt the same way, so those things were rarefied in the focused our attention and i think that if you are that age today you just have some more options and more choices, so its somewhat devalues the music. Doesnt necessarily mean good music doesnt get made, but its like if the market is flooded with diamonds then diamonds lose their value and its the same thing. So, i havent really answered your question. How what how do i encourage them . You just have to follow your instinct. If your impulses to make music then you need to go into it. The equipment is there to do it, the publishing means is there to do it. At least you dont have to get a cassette to an argyle, the kind of things we had to deal with, so in some ways its better, but in other ways its tougher than it ever was. Thank you for coming. I have a few points. First, not sure where i lived that was different than the rest of the world, but hyperactive was our go to song every friday in college and kept us going throughout the weekend. Set get peace, when you reunite with the jazz mafia horns like you debt sxsw . That was quite created and ties into probably the first question , think the title of this is thinking outside the box and certainly that is one of the things that my children learned how to do and i havent quite hoped with that yet, but how do you foster that sort of in your students or encourage them to push their boundaries and go beyond what is conventional and to think outside the box . Alex, thank you for coming, also in the area of film music, as distinct from music as a whole, so what ive been teaching them so far, we have been sort of looking at what the role is of music in film and tv and what its really therefore. Its a very interesting time for television and the whole sort of cadence of storytelling Character Arcs and in fact music is different again in episodic tv than it is from films, but many of them have never given much thought to for the contribution made the films. Theres the obvious things like establishing time and place and so on and creating moods, but if you are a film maker its really vital that you learn how to relate to composers and talk to musicians and the same way you have to learn to talk to an actor if you are not an actor, so we have been focused on that and i courage the extent it with their point of view to see what they can do to enhance the drama, emotion in a scene and i will typically for example take a scene from a movie with no music, send them off in paris to an edit suite for an hour and a with the internet switched off, no phones and tell them in an hour and a half they will come back and projected on a big screen for the whole class to critique and i would like them to take two or three different types of approaches and see if they can very that empathy we feel for certain character on the screen, maybe create subtext like suggest something off camera that we dont see them so on and get them to think outside the box, really and that means overcoming your fear of screen up. Johns hopkins students have a deepseated fear of screen up work they are supersmart, super intense and almost embarrassed to speak up in class because their room at mates might ridicule them, so the micah students on the other hand have sort of green hearing piercings, so they rub off on each other and thats great. So this will broaden out as of next year when i have a whole department to work with and those will be largely classical students, classical musicians who are looking for alternative career paths in making music for games, Virtual Reality and harsh reality even working the geriatric patients or stroke victims to see how they can use music to help the healing process. So, i have taken i think the principles ive developed over the last two or three years in my film music class and expanded those to a wider spectrum of types of different careers that they will follow when they leave the university. Interesting. Yes, sir mac well, i was going to ask that same question. How do you Balance Technology and the organic field of expressing yourself . Personally, im an electronic engineer. I have all the stuff in my house to do it, but theres a blockage between technology and being analog expressing myself. Any pointers . I mean, hermes its interesting you say that because at this point in my life ive noticed to lock myself away in a room with a bunch of machines. No, i get sometimes i do want to lock myself in a room and do it, but some people who dont produce, they dont understand that you just want to be in a room by yourself with your stuff and computers. Heres the way i like to do it, i mean, a tracking session is to me like manna from heaven, the best place to be. Its hard to write because you get a bunch of musicians in a room in the first hour all they want to do is like of each other and tell war stories and then they get hungry and the order in food and then they to their instruments and by that time you have maybe an hour. You have to record and in analog tape to headsets have be clean and everything lined up i went to school [inaudible] in the 90s i actually cut tape, you know . Bats with a taught me to do. Now, of course best of his magic and to me its like what you end up with when you come away from a session like that, those should be the Building Blocks when you lock yourself away in the back room rather than lets type in notes from scratch. I like the organic feel of what happens when musicians play together in a room and i would rather use those as my cookiecutter Building Blocks and collage of those and tweak them than just create the extract because the thing about machines is they know nothing about each other. You shall this bait tell this baseline to do this drum machine , they do what they are told, but they dont understand each other and thats what happens when musicians play together. I think we have time for perhaps one more question. Sorry, folks. I was thinking about some of the problems you have solved and im wondering how often technological or creative problems you solve sort of through the great and hard work and how often its been more of that serendipitous moment of thinking about that for you just had a thought and from that if there is a problem you are trying to solve right now in the Technology Field or perhaps other fields . I always talk about Thomas Edison and nicholas terrace or, edison had this wellfunded lab and his principle was to design a thousand experiments and exclude 999 of them until he came up with the right solution whereas tessler would get these mining moments of inspiration and invent dc current or guided missiles or a hair dryer these Amazing Things and he did that in a badly funded lab and i have neither the funding nor patience of Thomas Edison, so im definitely in that tessler camp and im willing to forgo all of the great and hard work and so on just for that one moment of inspiration because i think thats more valuable and sometimes in the moment it seems like commercially the wrong thing to do, but what i have discovered from a career of doing it is that over time you build at this currency. You build up this capital in consecutive decisions that are the right artistic decisions and they come back to serve you well as you get older and people get more respectful, your reputation grows and you get to appoint your life where every new offer that comes in the door feels right, feels enticing, but you are not afraid to say no to the ones that dont click for you. Very good. Ladies in german, thomas dolby. Ladies and gentlemen, thomas dolby. [applause]. Thomas will sign copies of his book over in the activity building. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] that wraps a book tvs live coverage of the 15th annual Annapolis Book festival. Everything you have seen today will air again tonight beginning at midnight eastern time and you can also watch each individual segment online at book tv. Org. Sunday night on afterwards, blue on blue, and insiders story of good cops catching bad cops. Former chief of the Nypd Internal Affairs bureau talks about his book with former nypd officer and author of, once a copy. I spent 41 years in the nypd. I saw acts of courage, bravery, integrity, but theres always
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