Join us today as we talk with two innovators who will be joining us at the carousel and on the beach at the Music Tectonics Conference October 22-24.
First up, a conversation with Jennifer Sullivan of KiTbetter. Tristra dives into the magic behind the KiTalbum, where the lines between physical and digital music blur – creating new opportunities for both fans and artists. Next, Dmitri talks with Zack Settel from WalkThruMusic about advancing beyond a passive listening experience and moving into a navigable listening experience for musical immersion.
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Join the Music Tectonics team and top music innovators by the beach for the best music tech event of the year:
6th Annual Music Tectonics Conference October 22-24, 2024 Santa Monica, California
Episode Transcript
Machine transcribed
0:00:10 - Dmitri
Welcome back to Music Tectonics, where we go beneath the surface of music and tech. I'm your host, Dmitri Vietze. I'm also the founder and CEO of Rock Paper Scissors, the PR and marketing firm that specializes in music tech and innovation, and the Music Tectonics conference is less than a week away. It takes place October 22nd to 24th in Santa Monica. Badge sales are higher than ever and we expect this to be the most talked about music tech event of the year. Badges are still available, so you can still jump on this.
We've added a creator fair where you can put your hands on new musical instruments from Pioneer DJ, from Alpha Theta, from Roland, blipblox, artifon and the creepy awesomeness of the Demon Box, which makes sound powered by any electronic device that emits electromagnetic currents.
You've got to see this in person. But it's not like we've gotten rid of the main conference where decision makers from the music industry get to be there first to try out, hear from and invest in all types of music tech that help generate new revenue streams or create more engaging and immersive fan experiences. Today, on the episode, we have a couple of short conversations with two companies who will be doing this very thing on the beach with us in Santa Monica Walkthrough Music and Kit Better. In a few moments I speak with Zach Settle, the co-founder and CTO of Walk Through Music, who'll be giving VR demos at the conference, where you can walk through a song and experience music in a brand new physical way. But first my co-host, Tristra Newyear Yeager, speaks with Jennifer Sullivan, representing Kit Better, about the importance of physical experiences in a digital music world and how to enrich digital music experiences in a way that's truly meaningful to fans and that's fun for artists and their teams.
0:01:52 - Tristra
Hi, Jennifer. Thank you so much for coming to speak with me about Kit Better.
0:01:58 - Jennifer
Thank you so much for having me.
0:02:00 - Tristra
So first I want to ask you just to introduce yourself and talk about your relationship with Kit Better MuseLive, this wonderful company that is going to be coming to Music Tectonics to talk about their really interesting offering.
0:02:13 - Jennifer
Yes, absolutely so, and thank you again for having me. I have been a longtime fan of everything that Rock Paper Scissors does. I run a marketing company called Membrane, based in LA, and we typically do a lot of trend reporting. So a couple of years ago I was at CES and several of my friends were texting me telling me you need to check out this booth for this company called Kit Better, and they had this technology that reminded them of HitClips, which were a Hasbro product that launched it back in 1999 and were actually the origin story for Membrane, my current company and Membrane had essentially done all of the music licensing for HitClips on behalf of Hasbro, and so when I saw the product, the kit album, which is essentially this little device that comes in a beautifully packaged box that unlocks content on any smartphone, I got very excited because I immediately thought of HitClips, but I also thought, once I got into the technology, I got really excited about the fact that they had several patents on the technology. Last year they won an innovation award at CES and to me, whenever I see a new innovation, I always think about protectability, something that's distinguishable, something that sets it apart from competitors, something unique that they can offer to the marketplace, and I'm a former opera singer and music teacher and I had a career in music at one point, but one of my biggest challenges was finances and figuring out how to pay for my life as a musician without taking 10 different jobs.
So, luckily, being a musician and having to survive, I learned to do graphic design, I learned how to teach. I learned all of these different skills, but when I learned that artists were making $5 per product sold on these products, I got very excited as well. So that's kind of the origin story of how I was introduced to the kit album. It was a chance encounter in Vegas at CBS, as you do. I met the chief technology officer and he and I became really good friends and within a few months I started working with the company and then just recently, I became their chief marketing officer about two months ago.
0:04:48 - Tristra
Congratulations.
0:04:49 - Jennifer
Really exciting opportunity, in addition to my role with Membrane.
0:04:52 - Tristra
Amazing. So there are two parts to, as you explained, to a KIT album, and this is not. I mean. Well, kit is amazing. These two parts are very much in the conversation right now, right, so we have the physical object, which is very important to fans, especially younger fans we're hearing, and then you have the digital experience, which you know can be enriched in all sorts of ways. So I want to dive into both of those. First, let's talk about the physical side. You know, physical formats have had obviously a longstanding history in music and a lot of cultural meaning and weight. They seem to be resurging in people's hearts and minds. Why do you think that's happening? What's happening with these sort of physical objects and their relationship with music?
0:05:40 - Jennifer
Well, I think we've seen a shift. Records and cassettes and CDs in some ways have diminished in value. Records were something very premium that people literally would put on their walls, but then cassettes and CDs, I think, with digital technology, were immediately impacted because they could be replicated and duplicated and I feel like music has become invisible for a lot of people. In terms of, if you think about consumer value, people are willing to pay for something but they want something in return and it's hard to manifest something that is invisible. And that's why we're seeing this resurgence in vinyl records coming back, even though I think the statistics something like 50% of people that buy vinyl don't have record players, and I think that has a lot of people credit nostalgia. But to me it's actually more about consumer value and the value proposition of making a purchase and getting something in return, something that you can hold in your hands. It's also kind of, you know, if you think about, you know, a souvenir.
Whenever you have an experience, you want to take something away with you.
So I think, you know, when we see live shows having fantastic merchandise results, that's because when people go to a show, they don't just want to, you know, go and see it.
They also want to go and come back with something as a reminder of that experience.
And so I think, even though there's you know, there's so much opportunity with digital technology, where we have access to endless catalogs of music and it's democratized, the ability for artists to reach audiences around the world, there's still a desire from a fan perspective to have something that they can hold in their hands.
And I think that the quality of what that something is is also now at a higher level than it ever was before, because, you know, we have a lot of different things that we can purchase, and I think, if we're going to make an investment in something like music, we want something that you know is unique, something that you know kind of sets it apart. It's just like if you were to go to a movie in a movie theater, you have the ability to watch a movie at home, but if you're able to have a special experience in the theater, if it's, you know, made for a theater experience, I think all of all of entertainment is kind of experiencing this, you know, kind of. You know there's a convenience factor that's associated with a lot of streaming types of technologies, but then the experience can be sacrificed, so we're trying to find a place in between.
0:08:33 - Tristra
And there's also an element in the digital realm of how we can enrich music beyond. You know, just providing an on-demand stream or a file, etc. You know just providing an on-demand stream or a file, et cetera, and I know this is part of Kit, a Kit album, and it's part of some other experiences that people are building out there when it comes to having enhanced visuals or additional quote-unquote content. You know, how are you seeing digital experiences being enriched in music right now? You know how are artists or labels or innovators approaching this from different angles? What do you think?
0:09:06 - Jennifer
Well, I think data is what everyone is really focused on when it comes to digital technology. There's insights, there's information that you can learn about your fans. You know, ownership of that data is something that's increasingly become a topic of conversation in the industry.
I think James Blake has been very vocal recently about having the ability to own his own audience, whether that's for ticketing, whether that's for the streaming, whether that's social media. I think for us, what's exciting about the Kid album is that we offer 30 points of data for artists on a physical product sale. So once you know you sell a CD, you don't get any data about the fan, you just know that they've made a purchase. You know, as long as you're a wholesaler or whomever is telling you you know who's made the purchase. But with the Kid album, you know, you have access to a dashboard of information about you know how many times your fan has listened to each one of the songs and who the number one fan is and where they're located in the world and how old they are and their demographics.
And I think that's what we're seeing as the you know value proposition for the future for musicians is, you know, owning your data, owning your audience, being able to have a direct relationship with your fans to the extent that you are able to make, you know decisions about how you're marketing, where you're performing, all of those sorts of things. So I think that's the most important aspect of digital, that and, you know, obviously, having some kind of you know, enhanced experience for your music. So we're also offering like video content. So it's not just the you know passive listening, it's also kind of the ritual of sitting down and having a fully immersive album experience plays into the conversation around superfans that's going to feature pretty prominently at this year's Music Tectonics.
0:11:07 - Tristra
I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think superfans are looking for and what haven't we quite cracked in the music industry or in the offerings that we're making to fans. How could we encourage people to get more out of music?
0:11:22 - Jennifer
Yeah, I feel like music is, you know, I think it should be something to be treasured and I think super fans have this, you know, almost irrational connection to their favorite artists. It's something that's fully emotional and they want something they can cherish, something they can hold in their hands. That's why you see fans that will purchase multiple versions of an album or they'll buy all of the merchandise that's made available. I think we've kind of veered towards novelty quite a bit in music, where it's T-shirts, it's hats, it's all of these things that are not music, they're kind of ancillary, promotional types of products and where I think it's important to focus again and we're seeing it with vinyl and hopefully we'll see it with the Kid album is bringing the value proposition back to the music format itself.
0:12:21 - Tristra
That's really cool. That's a great point. I mean, I've heard of artists doing all sorts of interesting things, from like their own apps with mobile games to really complicated physical objects like wooden puzzles or all sorts of crazy stuff Some stuff that's not safe for work or for mention on a professional podcast a professional podcast. But you're right, the music I mean essentially the farther. I mean that stuff is fun and I think I love seeing people experiment with that. But the farther away we get from music, the more we're actually making the long term job of marketing or promoting ourselves a bunch harder, like way harder, yes, yeah it's really interesting.
So Kit has a really interesting technical side, and then I want to talk about our technological side, and this is a music tech podcast, so I want to dive into the technology. It uses a technology called UNFC, and so I was wondering if you could let us know what that is and why it was so perfect for this kind of application.
0:13:26 - Jennifer
So Muse Live is the manufacturer behind KitBetter and they started in 2015 with NFC, which is near field communication, which we're all pretty familiar with now because it's what Apple Pay uses. It's, you know, built into most smart devices, most smartphones. Originally, the News Live released the album as an NFC album. They were the first company to ever do that, which was exciting and interesting. But what they realized quickly was that there were some limitations to NFC, number one being that it wasn't installed in devices like tablets and it still isn't available in a lot of tablets because you don't pay with your tablet, you don't really need to have that capability in that device and head-mounted displays and all of these kind of future-proofed technologies or technologies that are coming. So they created a new technology called ultrasonic NFC, so it doesn't rely on your smart device having NFC capabilities, so it will work with any device that has a microphone, which is a standard feature on any smart device. So it uses ultrasonic sound and it's a signature. It's an audio signature that is a one-to-one key that unlocks the content on the authenticated user's device. So that means that only the person that has the kit album that has the kit device, I should say is granted access to the data, and that can be music and videos and photos and all kinds of other things. But it acts as a password and so the user is able to log in without having to do anything except for clicking a little button on the kit device next to the kit player, which is an app in your any app store and, like I said, that unlocks 40 points of data for the artist. So they have a dashboard and they can see every time that the fan is clicking in to their album experience. They can hear, you know, see how many times the fan is playing each one of their songs, how long they're staying within the experience. It also is more secure than other technologies. There's no ability to pirate the content. So it's all within the kit player experience. It's an app and so whenever the fan is in the experience, that's exclusively to them. If they give their kit device to a friend, like you would a CD or a cassette tape, their friend then has access to the content, but they no longer have access to the content. So it just it's exactly the same as any other physical media, which is, you know. It's great for us because it gives us the ability to kind of control the you know kind of sharing, file sharing, those sorts of things which really aren't as much of an issue anymore now that streaming's just kind of decimated. You know, music, digital music.
The other thing that's exciting about this is that we can offer high resolution files. So our cloud-based servers are pretty unlimited in terms of size. So we can have FLAC files, we can have WAV files. We don't have to be relegated to MP3. So the sound quality can also be pretty exciting. We're also looking at like spatial audio right now as something that we can offer. We can offer full films on the player. So you know, that just gives you a sense of the capabilities of using this type of a technology versus a technology that's more of a novelty, where it just is there to kind of be a shortcut to Spotify or iTunes or whatever else. You're listening to Apple Music, I should say.
0:17:23 - Tristra
Gotcha Gotcha. So it's like not just a web link in a pretty box, it's actually got a bunch of other stuff that really differentiates it from yeah, like from just having someone basically open a Dropbox.
0:17:37 - Jennifer
Yeah, and you don't have to have a separate account. You don't have to, you know, be signed into your Spotify or whatever other account it's linking to. It creates kind of an immersive experience all within the same ecosystem. So you're staying within the player and you're having a special experience that's just exclusive to whatever artist you're a fan of.
0:17:57 - Tristra
Amazing. Well, thank you, jennifer. So much for introducing us to Kit Albums and Muse Live and UNFC Technology. You mentioned that it's a patented tech right.
0:18:09 - Jennifer
It is. We have several patents. We were honored with an Innovation Award this year at CES and we're hoping for continued awards for the technology. I think it's over 20 patents that protect the technology, including some NFC technologies as well, so it's exciting to work with this team. Plus, they have their own store that they just opened in Seoul, korea. They have their own factory. It's a smart factory. They have offices in Seoul and then they've just opened a store in a really popular, trendy area of Seoul. It's a four story store. It's a music store, which is super exciting.
0:18:49 - Tristra
That is exciting. There's a performance space.
0:18:51 - Jennifer
There's a meet and greet area for you know pop idols to come in and yeah, I just I love the idea that it's kind of bringing back that tangible, you know fan experience in every way possible.
0:19:04 - Tristra
I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining us. See, I'll see you at Music Tectonics.
0:19:08 - Jennifer
Yay, we're excited to be there. Thank you so much for having us.
0:19:12 - Dmitri
We've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
0:19:15 - Ad
Hey Music Tectonics listeners, Shaylee, here again with another conference programming update. First, I want to share a little bit about one of our keynote conversations by Verification the presidential debate with Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Sarasano of Media Research. As election fever builds, music Tectonics brings you its very own music industry presidential debate. On one side, the traditional, streaming-focused music business. On the other, the emerging fandom and creator-centered sector. Streaming and social go head-to-head. Media analysts will present the case for each side as they explain how, regardless of which side you may be backing, today's music business will become too.
This next panel is a favorite of mine each year because of how quickly the landscape is evolving the state of music and gaming, with panelists from Riot Games, epic Games, tune Global being moderated by industry expert Vicky Nauman. Music has a crush on the gaming industry and exciting things are developing that smash two of the most powerful culture industries together. That smashed two of the most powerful culture industries together. Find out from leaders in gaming how music is staying core to the gamer experience and why so many labels and artists think of games as a growth opportunity. That's it for now. If you haven't secured your badge, head over to musictectonicscom to purchase yours now. See you soon.
0:20:44 - Dmitri
And we're back. Next up is my conversation with Zach Settle of Walkthrough Music. We get into his crazy invention that allows you to not only walk through a song virtually and sonically, but gives the potential to create music in this immersive way as well. Okay, I'm excited. We've got with us here a really cool new startup called Walkthrough Music, and one of our guests is the co-founder and CTO, zach Settle. Welcome to the show, zach.
Hey, Dmitri.
And also joining us is Dick Wingate. He's the principal of the music and technology consulting firm DevAdvisors. Dick's working with Zach and Walkthrough Music. He's also a regular at the Music Tectonics Conference, so a lot of you already know him. Hey, dick, good to have you here.
0:21:26 - Zach
It's great to be here, Dmitri, and I look forward to Music Tectonics as much as any event all year.
0:21:35 - Dmitri
So here we are.
0:21:36 - Zach
It's almost October.
0:21:38 - Dmitri
Yes, yes, yes. This will be just a couple weeks from the conference. This episode's coming out, and let's dive right in. Zach, what is Walkthrough Music and how did you get here?
0:21:50 - Dick
Well Walkthrough Music has become a technology for creating and rendering music experiences. Unlike the other three DOF spatializer techs like Ambisonics or Dolby Atmos or Apple Sony 360, techs like ambisonics or dolby atmos or apple sony 360, uh. Wtm uses spatial depth navigation to to give you a much greater degree of sonic interaction, uh as a listener what does that mean?
wait, tell me, what that means sack so basically what it means is we, unlike the other spatializers that are targeting pannable soundtracks, they give you a universe of pannable soundtracks that are designed initially to sort of like surround sound, to bring audio to loudspeaker systems configurations like in a theater, and so forth audio to loudspeaker systems, configurations like in a theater and so forth and they work.
You know, the regular conventional spatializers use sort of an abstract model to locate sounds in the abstract space of listening, listening mixing, studio space and walkthrough music. Instead of targeting a soundtrack, it targets what we call a music scene, and a music scene consists of sounds and a venue. If you take one great example, it's just the orchestra. If you take a concert hall and you model that and you model the sound sources in that concert hall, but specifically instruments and things like that, you end up with a music, what I call a music scene, what we call a music scene that includes sort of the important features of that venue, music listening experience.
And so when you're, as a user, in that music scene, you can navigate your perspective just the same way as you could do in a symphony, orchestra, concert hall or anywhere else for that matter, and you can move around. And any time you move, no matter whether you're close or far away, the distance between you and each instrument changes. I get it.
0:23:58 - Dmitri
It gives a liveliness to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it's. You know sounds like. I mean the name is perfect Zach Walk Through Music. What you're saying is some of these other ones. You put it on, you listen to it and you get a sense of things coming from different directions, but what you're saying is you can actually move through the sound with the way you've got it set up, right.
0:24:14 - Dick
So if we, if our if our technology was was like the others, we would call it pan through music but, it's not.
We actually can use the depth dimension and take our listening perspective in a given music scene, which is another way of saying mix. Uh, and we use the word 60 of, because 60 of basically means you can pan your, your listening around, just like you can do with all the atmos and the other things, and particularly with apple spatial headphones and those things. Right, it's really groovy. But you can also step to the left, step to the right, move forward and backwards within that sonic image and to us that's a key thing. It brings a lot of stuff and you know the tech so far.
Our experience, starting with me, gets people excited because it uses sonic depth to you know the sonic depth that your navigation gives you a sense of really being where the music is. Much more so it's very, very, very lively listening by letting you hear a lot more detail in music, meaning that if you feel like walking up to the electric guitar amp, you're going to hear that solo you're going to hear. Or you walk up to a singer, real up close and personal, you're going to hear all kinds of details that you wouldn't be able to get at otherwise. And I'm not saying you want to or don't want to do that. That's a question of. That's a whole other subject. But this technology lets you let, in addition to what soundtracks give you, uh, it lets you do a whole bunch more stuff as well, got it, got it.
0:25:53 - Dmitri
So what I'm curious, like how did immersive music come to be what it is, and and how you fit into that? How did you get here?
0:26:02 - Dick
okay, well, my, my story in all of this is I used to be one of those weird well, I probably still am, but you know, one of those esoteric electronic music types. I was one of the in the core, you know, beginning team of Max MSP and then Pure Data and so on and so forth, and we did a lot of music back then using computers and at some point we ended up being able to bring our computer up on stage with us and performing on stage with the computer and at some point, David.
Ziccarelli, who was the founder of Cycling 74, pointed out in an ICMC International Computer Music Conference talk back in the day he pointed out that all the musicians computer music musicians were becoming office workers. We'd all be sitting up on the stage, glued to a desk, basically playing a saxophone alongside of the desk and changing parameters and foot pedals and so forth. And at some point I kind of got fed up with. I thought he was right and I got fed up with not being able to walk around and move around the way we used to do or the way you do when you play acoustically. So that began my journey into pretty much the virtualization of. Now I know what it is is. Back then I had no idea what to call it. But that really is my first step towards the virtualization of spatial processes and at the beginning it was really just bussing my saxophone sound through the air in a virtual, in a virtual scene, and hitting effects, processing targets, which may be kind of an abstract thing, but basically it was a spatial interface that more or less imitated the physics of how the sound moves and things like that. And before I knew it I was starting to do other things using that representation, my big sort of awakening came kind of like in the days of surround sound. I had created an app to go with the Yamaha DMC-1000 mixer so that you could deal with surround sound.
And a friend of mine here in Montreal, luc Courcham, had a project and he needed sync sound because his video project, which consists of using a spherical camera to go through neighborhoods in Japan, he lacked the sync sound. There was a truck parked on the side of the road, there were some people walking and as you went through his video you seriously were in need of sort of sync sound. So he got me to use my surround sound spatializer to do that and I thought, oh, I've got this, this is perfect.
Turns out that my concept was completely backwards. I needed something that was able to simulate a moving listener and not moving sound sources, and surround sound does not have a moving listener if, if you discount rotation and panning. So suddenly I realized I needed to turn my thinking upside down and start thinking about what a mobile listener in a virtual scene really means. And then the rest is just sort of what happened over the years trying different things and making art and dance pieces and things like that that were inspired by the use of gaming technology, because, in the end, we're talking about things that come very easily to let's say, game authoring Gaming there's a place, there's a player who's in a place, Whereas in music oftentimes you're listening, either sitting still or doing something else, rather than participating in a way that makes a lot of sense.
0:29:49 - Dmitri
You know, it makes me wonder, like what have the breakthrough moments been in immersive music in recent years? I mean, we've got the, you know, the gaming thing is a great point, but we've seen, you know, VR headsets and things like that. How do you think about why immersive music even is a space that people are experimenting with and exploring?
0:30:10 - Zach
I think that I'll pick, that, I'll take that one, you know. I think that's a great transition from the discussion of gaming, because that's essential to the culture today and essential being that gamers and people in general that are sort of lean forward consumers of music and culture want to be able to personalize their experience, and that's what walkthrough music is all about. It's about personalization. So we've seen breakthroughs in terms of gaming events that have been well publicized with artists, but we're also the Things like the in real world examples like the Van Gogh exhibitions, which have been very, very, very popular in multiple cities, and the forthcoming Bob Marley interactive experience in Las Vegas. The Sphere in Vegas is a great example of an interactive experience, and this week, or maybe sometime in the last week or so, I noticed that Warner Brothers Discovery announced an entirely new division covering experiences, theme parks, tours, exhibitions, etc. To bring best-in-class experiences to fans around the world.
So Dolby Atmos and the other formats which have been referred to already definitely have already opened the door to a better audio experience. As I think you said, dimitri, they're fixed. There are a lot of different positions, but they're fixed. Walkthrough music allows for much more customization, so I want to be up close and I want to be. I want to be right in front of Lars of Metallica, so I'm hearing the drums featured. There you go.
0:32:21 - Dmitri
Yeah, zach, what will the experience be like with walkthrough music? How are you guys pushing what some of this context Dick is talking about into a new type of experience?
0:32:37 - Dick
Great question. We think our technology is quite disruptive in the grand scheme of things, because we focus first of all because understanding that we're disruptive, most disruptive in a music context. We think it's disruptive because it is saying you're making music now where the listener can move around, so that has enormous implications in terms of sonic interaction. It has enormous implications in terms of composition, creation strategies to create sonic experiences that will lend well to a navigable listener. And there's been, very, very surprisingly, very little sort of work or art done based on this concept. Certainly, it's got to be out there because it's in the air, but it's surprising. We're always surprised to see just how novel our proposition appears to be. So I'll just give a quick little example. Appears to be. So I'll just give a quick little example.
We, we, we finished, we had some research with the Montreal symphony orchestra and the SAT, the Société des Arts Technologiques in Montreal. At the SAT they had they they're kind of pioneers in domes and they, 10 years ago they had, they had a, you know, had a giant 18, 20-meter dome with 151, you know, the Myers SpaceMap sound system, 151 speakers and all kinds of advanced audio propositions going on back then. And out of this sort of technology came a research project with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra to essentially create new audiences. But in that effort you realize that you're taking a music that was composed, you know, two centuries ago and putting it in a brand new context compositionally. How does that, you know? Does it work? Does it sound good? Where in that immersive space would you like to listen to it from?
We learned, we learned a lot about that, so I'd say that it's very early in terms of immersion. I'd say that the panable listener, such as we have today with Dolby Atmos and basically all the other current spatialization systems, that panable listener that can't move, is turning into a completely navigable listener that can pan and that can translate in music scenes and specifically in games. Because we can now include those activities, that kind of interaction, the level of immersion goes up a notch. Yeah, I mean, do you imagine this being the level of immersion goes?
0:35:41 - Dmitri
up a notch. Yeah, I mean, do you imagine this being the type of like immersive van gogh experiences that dick referred to, or, um, you know, like these in person experiences, or is this an at-home experience with, you know, new types of headsets or or headphones, or?
0:35:59 - Dick
what's great about it is it's agnostic to this way of working and rendering audio. Creating rendering audio is agnostic to the what they call the audio display system, so it could be binaural headphones, any, any speaker system, including the sphere in las vegas, whose job it is to deliver audio as spatially complete as possible. Uh, work, so this system is intended to work across the board, gotcha.
0:36:28 - Dmitri
So I think you're going to have this experience set up for music tectonics conference goers to experience. You're also going to be speaking on a panel about immersive music, but how will our attendees experience walk through music when they arrive?
0:36:39 - Dick
attendees experience walkthrough music when they arrive, we will have a demo booth with the alpha version of our demo, our latest demo, and we will have some MetaQuest 3 headsets that will allow users, probably just in VR mode. The demo works in VR and AR mode. We'll probably just keep it simple and to the point and users will be able to put on the headset and walk through the music basically, that's such a good name.
0:37:11 - Dmitri
Yeah, right, right, we do kick off the event at the carousel at the Santa Monica Pier, which is on the beach, and there'll be lots of great experiences there, and then we continue on over at this uh, this basically beach house, this, this pool house, that. Um, yeah, we won't let you walk into the pool or the ocean as you're getting sonically intrigued and immersed. Um, this is really cool to get a deep dive into what you guys are up to. Um, where do you think we'll be with immersive music in, say, five years?
0:37:40 - Dick
well, maybe I'll go take, do you? Want, we'll be with immersive music in, say, five years. Well, maybe I'll go. Dick, do you want to take your?
0:37:47 - Zach
first question I'll take it. I think we're just dipping our toe into immersive music. The five-year horizon, from my perspective, is to not just make it available to be immersed and navigate and personalize, but then to socialize it so that we're sharing a music experience where we're navigating through a venue or we're navigating through on stage with the band or any environment that makes sense to navigate the music.
0:38:46 - Dick
And so that's to me. I think social will be the next level for immersive music. Just to add to what Dick's saying you know, basically what our proposition says is that you don't use soundtracks anymore. If you want to have a soundtrack, you can still have it right, you can just stick it in your virtual environment coming out of speakers, just like you have in Roblox or Fortnite or whatever. But really what our proposition is saying basically, we would like to see music be geometrically. We would like to see music have the option to be geometrically integrated into our virtual experiences. That means the music, the sources of the music, the instruments, everything they're embodied, they occupy space and they're geometrically integrated in those environments. So I would say that that geometric integration I think will happen over the next five years and it will allow people to do live streaming that really makes people feel like they're actually there where the music is being played, bringing people that much closer to the remote venue.
0:39:53 - Zach
To me, the gating factor on the growth of this entire area is enabling the stems to be utilized in this fashion, and we're still at the very earliest days of especially the major labels allowing their stems to be used accordingly. Now they can be extracted using the various AI technologies and that'll work, but they're not going to be as pristine as what you would get from the masters. So that's a gating factor that I think will get better and better as the labels figure out the model for licensing their stems. It's still so early in that regard.
0:40:44 - Dmitri
You know, zach, as you were talking about the geometric experience of music in games, in, in, you know, these digital spaces, it made me think about that weird sort of joy you get when you're walking up to like an outdoor festival stage where you're hearing something from behind you, you're hearing something from in front of you, from the left, from the right, and as you're moving towards it your heart almost like fills up. You get this like wave of chills of the spatialness of the experience you're having. That you don't think about consciously when you're at a festival and you don't think about it consciously when you're listening to headphones, listening to a record or a streaming service where it's very flat, that you don't notice that it's gone. But I think we're going to start to notice it more when we have the types of experiences you described, where it feels like oh shoot, we've been missing an element this whole time that embodied element of music, where we're going from this flat, abstracted sense of listening to this embodied presence.
Like you, have a sense that you are somewhere, rather than this invisible space. You can't see the studio, you can't see the instruments or the artists, but sonically we're going to start to experience a sense of that location and it's discovery too, you know it can.
0:41:56 - Dick
Really. Just, it opens the door to discovery, not only in terms of the music you already know or new music or whatever, but, you know, as an artistic, as, let's say, a creative operator in this new frontier. I think over the next five years we're going to not only will we be able to experience existing music like this, but people are, are going to listen to that and say, damn, you know what I can, I can create some music that should be, should be, could be listened to, with the idea that people will pass through it in different ways more than one time to discover new aspects. And one great example of music that can work that way.
I know how familiar the audience might be with, uh, steve reich, or or john adams, or the you know classic contemporary music composers, but but they write the, this kind of music that you know when you're hearing them live or in rehearsals and things like that. And you just change your position, you know, by six feet. Suddenly the groove that's like going in four, it's like four, four turns into like a three groove and you're like what? And that happened because you just happen to move. So I think that I think creatively, you know, provided that that that people have access to this, uh, there's great. There's huge amount of of new things that we can't even imagine that that we're going to be able to do.
0:43:21 - Dmitri
You just got me thinking about spatial polyrhythms. Yes, I love that you're coming to be at Music Tectonic, zach and Dick Zach. As an artist yourself, as a musician yourself, I can see the excitement. It's like another parameter that you're playing with that you couldn't get out of a saxophone by itself, and that kind of artistic vision is awesome. I'm really excited to try these out when we get to music tectonics. So I'll see you in a couple of weeks, guys. Yeah, looking forward to it.
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The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Weekly episodes include interviews with music tech movers & shakers, deep dives into seismic shifts, and more.