Thomas Dolby Quotes (26 Quotes)


    I started looking at small companies that were running a sort of virtual reality cottage industry: I had imagined that I would just put on a helmet and be somewhere else - that's your dream of what it's going to be.

    The other thing I felt was that the philosophical concept behind the experiences also looked like it had been designed by technicians and not by entertainers. I felt I needed to grab hold of it and try and push the envelope as much as I possibly could right now.

    That record actually got a lot of recognition in Europe, but it was lost in the shuffle in the States. I keep running into people, most recently the president of a major record company, who say it's one of their favorite albums of all time.

    There are a lot of producers coming out calling themselves interactive and a lot of them at the moment are being designated by the big companies.

    But it really took this long for me to be able to take a breather from it and come back to music which was always my first love.



    If you're Take That for example, you don't need to be seen in the studio. But they have their own fans, and their fans would like a way to get closer.

    It's especially great with Head Space because it's kind of like forming a band, I can bring on board some of my friends that I think are talented.

    In a way, my role now is to shift into the next set of tool, which is virtual reality and interactivity. That to me is very enticing.

    I never really intended to take 10 years away from the music business.

    It's been over 15 years since I toured... over 12 years since I did any recording under my own name. I never really intended to take that long of a hiatus.

    So evidently music was a killer app and is a killer app for computer and the Internet; it just took the tech industry a long time to hear that message.

    If you think back to the '70's, there were these new tools, with very few people using them in pop music. There's a real parallel with that now.

    The hardware manufacturers, game designers, cable companies and computer companies and, in fact, film studios are going to ensure that this thing marches on. They know that they are going to make an enormous amount of money from it.

    Then I have a head mounted display which actually was designed for the military to do synchronized building entries and that's looking down at my hands, so projected on the big screen behind me, you can see my hands as I'm putting the tracks together.

    Well, you know, I mean, I first did my live shows in the late 70's and in those days I had a boatload of equipment that always seemed to be going wrong.

    I was desperate really for people not to accuse me of coldness. It was taboo.

    So a more sensible thing it seemed to me was to go to Silicon Valley and be pushing on the technology companies to accelerate the use of audio and music in computers.

    It was supposed to be a year or two just to refresh my batteries, but I moved to Silicon Valley in the early 90's, and one thing let to another, got very involved in high tech, and formed a company and it ended up doing pretty well.

    I'm actually more interested in the other half of the world, because I wouldn't like to be excluded from any of this technology.

    So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.

    At the same time, one of the things I noticed was that the moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it.

    I was very pleased to find that once I had records out music videos were starting to happen, so I directed some of my own music videos and got to experiment in other areas of expression.

    From a technical point of view, there seemed to me to be absolutely no reason why - with the existing technology - we couldn't do very high quality audio, because whereas the boom in digital graphics is ongoing, the boom in digital audio has already happened.

    The games industry is already bigger than the music industry, and it's mainly directed at teenage boys.



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