A lecture demonstration and book signing by Thomas Dolby about his experiences in the music and tech industries, the subject of his recently published memoir The Speed of Sound.
“Rapid advances in communications and computing power do NOT always lead to a parallel increase in human innovation. Personal excellence comes from shattering your own boundaries. The best ideas are born out of a scarcity of resources.”
“Need to solve a problem? Begin by switching off your smartphone. Unplug that laptop. Flip through an ancient Rolodex, gather a few great people around a blackboard, make doodles on your yellow pad. Build something out of balsa wood. Fire up that squeaky turntable and dust off your vinyl collection. Break out the Tequila and do some shots!” –Thomas Dolby
About Thomas Dolby
As an early MTV icon Thomas Dolby blazed a trail for electronic music with his imaginative videos. The same year as his own record reached the top of the pop/dance charts, he co-wrote and produced the first ever platinum-selling rap 12” single Magic’s Wand by Whodini. His synth playing and production have graced the recordings of Foreigner, Def Lepperd, George Clinton and Joni Mitchell, earning five Grammy(TM) nominations. He appeared live with Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock, with David Bowie at Live Aid, and with Roger Waters at The Wall in Berlin. And his self-penned She Blinded Me With Science became a Top 5 Billboard hit, going on to become an evergreen geek anthem of the 1980s that still pops up in Grand Theft Auto, The Big Bang Theory and Breaking Bad.
Thomas has created original music for features films produced by George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Ken Russell; he has appeared with The Muppets, and on numerous TV shows from Soul Train toThe Late Show.
Sought after as a consultant for tech startups and research companies, Dolby seemed to have a hand in every emerging entertainment platform, from laser disks and computer games to interactive TV, virtual reality installations and location-based entertainment. His name is on multiple US patents, and he has worked as an investment advisor for top venture capital firms. During the early Silicon Valley internet explosion, Thomas founded high tech startup Beatnik Inc and co-created the code that drove interactive audio in Java. When mobile phones began to play polyphonic ringtones, it was via his BAE technology, which Beatnik licensed to phone manufacturers to be embedded in over two billion cellular phones and devices.
Between adding music to the mix as in-house Music Director of every TED Conference from 2001-12, Thomas taught himself to be a digital filmmaker; and in 2013 he won multiple awards for his groundbreaking film The Invisible Lighthouse, which chronicles the closure of a 250 year old lighthouse visible from his coastal home in Suffolk, UK.
Since Fall 2014 Thomas has held the post Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD.
About The speed of Sound, a memoir by Thomas Dolby
The Speed of Sound is the story of a man who stood at the vanguard of it all. From early appearances on MTV to tough negotiations with the biggest names in Silicon Valley, Dolby’s memoir takes readers through the voracious devotion of one man and his insatiable passion for music.
Walking home after being fired from his job at a grocery store, 17-year-old Thomas Dolby stumbled upon the circuit board from an abandoned musical synthesizer, a “Transcendent 2000,” lying in a dumpster. Few would have realized that this small discovery would lead to a career performing alongside David Bowie, pitching song lyrics to Michael Jackson or helping create the iconic Nokia cellphone ringtone. Dolby lived amongst legends and eventually became one himself, breaking down walls in the music world with hits like “She Blinded Me with Science,” and then doing the same during the technology revolution in Silicon Valley when he helped introduce sound to the internet. In The Speed of Sound: Breaking the Barriers Between Music and Technology, Thomas Dolby recounts a remarkable career of ups and downs, glamour and corruption, music and tech and the eventual melding of them all into perfect harmony.
After spending sleepless nights tweaking and restoring his newfound synthesizer back to life, Thomas Dolby skipped college to pursue his musical passions. For a man preceded by three generations of Cambridge professors and in the middle of the cultural and political revolutions of the 1970s, the idea of dropping everything to pursue music seemed to many of his friends and family like a fever dream. But Dolby was determined to live that dream and by 1982 he had become a household name with his hits (and accompanying self-directed music videos), “She Blinded Me With Science” and “Hyperactive.”
However, by the early 90s, Dolby had grown tired of the music industry with its ubiquitous corruption, back door dealings and sleazy executives. He uprooted his family and moved to the Bay Area where, seeing the inadequacies of music software, he seized an opportunity to make his mark on the tech industry. With the rise of the Internet, he recognized that websites were missing a crucial element—sound. Through his startup company, Beatnik Inc., Dolby helped pioneer audio in the earliest versions of virtual reality and convinced companies like Yahoo and Netscape that adding musical elements to their websites could draw in more visitors. Yet, once again faced with the reality of a corrupt and soul-crushing industry, and losing sight of his earliest visions for Beatnik, Dolby struggled to keep his startup afloat as the dotcom bubble burst. Clutching at a final opportunity to pivot and save the company, he shifted Beatnik’s focus to the emerging world of mobile uses for music, with astonishing success: Beatnik’s technology was eventually licensed and embedded into more than two billion wireless devices, and our cell phones haven’t sounded the same since.
Thomas Dolby has spent his career at the intersection of music and technology. He was an early star on MTV, and then moved to Silicon Valley, where he has an extraordinary career as an entrepreneur. He has been named Johns Hopkins University’s first Homewood Professor of the Arts, where he will help create a new center that will serve as an incubator for technology in the arts.
