It was the second day of DAC yesterday. If you were here, you probably saw some of these main events. If not, then read on. I'll tell you what you missed.

Thomas Dolby

The keynote was Thomas Dolby, probably most famous for his single "She Blinded Me with Science." To find out how that was made, read on.

He started in electronic music before it was a thing—you needed electronic knowledge to make it work. Now he works at the Peabody Institute at John Hopkins University (the earliest music conservatory in the world, he told us).

Thomas started of talking about how backward the pro (professional) audio industry is. They are still dealing with wave files. Most audio products are based on them. As he said:

My hard drive is packed with wave files. Other than the waverform and the title of the file there’s no other information available. They are dumb building blocks with no awareness of other ones.

You can say "Alexa, I want pizza" and it can even decide if you want to call out to Dominos or want a recipe to make it yourself. The consumer electronics industry is already streaks ahead of the pro audio industry. U2 or the Stones play in a circle. Sound engineers hate this. But most modern music from Taylor Swift, etc, are using these separate audio files with no consciousness.

I hate this stuff, I don’t want to be a bricklayer I want to be a conductor.

He blamed us for some of it. The "tyranny of Moore's Law". We're dealing with 8-bit and soon it will be 16 and 32. This has been the guiding principle behind pro-audio design. It needs to change, he said.

Rule #1 is you can do more with less.

Nikola Tesla worked for Edison who promised him a $40K bonus if he developed a DC generator. He did. Edison said "you don't understand the American sense of humor" and Tesla left, founded his own company, and invented a famously huge amount of things.

Thomas left school at 16, in an era when electronic music was very expensive. In a dumpster he found a circuit board to "build your own synthesizer". So he did. He sait in his bedsit all night, aged 17, creating songs with the bleeps and bloops. He got a stereo tape-recorder and discovered he could use left and right channels to multi-track, but each pass added noise. But he created his first demo, Pedestrian Walkway. This is the 2009 remastered version, the version he played us was more amateur:

He went from there to 4 channels with a 4-channel mixer that could record on both sides of a cassette at the same time. Information for anyone too young to have used cassette tapes: normally you would turn the cassette over to get to the "second side", which was two tracks since it was stereo, but there was no physical reason you couldn't record all 4 at once, two backwards. That was how pre-recorded cassettes were made, after all.

The next big break was when a guy called Mick Jones called him up from Foreigner, who were making Foreigner 4. He invited Thomas to NY to record some stuff for their next track. He didn't want to go since he was hoping to establish himself in Britain. His girlfriend at the time said to quote the "F-off" price, so he did. They accepted. That became Waiting for a Girl Like You. Today it sounds ordinary, but in that era all the synthesizers were unique.

Rule #2: always quote the F-off price.

They gave him a Mellotron, that each key was connected to a sound sample. But he'd only ever heard a monophonic, one sound-at-a-time, synthesizer. Foreigner wanted an intro for a ballad. One of the group described it as "massage music" but it turned out to be a big hit for Foreigner.

Then technology developed and he made an album, Golden Age of Wireless:

It got lots of critical acclaim and awards and sold, like, 3 copies

So he tried other markets. Like the Netherlands. Or Japan where he was voted "young scientist of the year."

MTV was just taking off so he decided to make a video about scientists. He showed the company his storyboard and they said "where's the song?". Oops, he'd forgotten that bit. He said he'd deliver it on Monday morning, which he did. He decided to hire a bona fide scientist to be in the video. If you are from Britain and old enough, you'll know who Magnus Pike is. But he was a "bit of a diva." He didn't want to say "blinded me with science" since he was a scientist and wouldn't expect a woman to blind him with science. But he said "science" in lots of intense ways, and that became She Blinded Me with Science. I can't find a full version of the video online, the one he played in the keynote, but this has lots of stills:

He took the profits from that to buy a Fairline Computer that cost $80K and he was considered a pioneer...because only a handful of people could afford one. It came with a box of floppy disk with about 80 sounds. But Thomas, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, and others used it, although they weren't exactly a large target market.

Thomas decided Silicon Valley wasn't moving fast enough so he created Beatnik. The worldwide web was just starting with links and browsers. They created a software synthesizer that would ship in the Netscape browser and then took it back to the music industry. You could remix tracks just on the regular keyboard, and then send it to your friends. It didn't attempt to send the actual sound files, just the cuts. They made "zero billion dollars". But one big client asked if they could port the technology to their device. Nokia. Selling in the millions. They were seeing phones coming out of Asia with musical ringtones. But they didn't want to build a dedicated soundchip. So Thomas put the software synthesizer on it and they did polyphonic ringtones. Including the Nokia ringtone. Didi dada didi dada didi da ding dong." Half a billion phones shipped with it. Then they got deeper into the phones and licensed the technology to Arm and Texas Instruments.

But Thomas decided to take a step back and retired from Silicon Valley and the tech entrepreneurial world and moved to a little village in England. He started to make another album. But people weren't buying albums any more, the were downloading stuff and playing video games. So the came up with a multi-user online game (I guess we'd call it a MMPG, although maybe not that massive at first). 

Five years ago he decided to go into teaching and show other people this stuff. He started at the Conservatory at John Hopkins University, with super-smart kids interested in composing for films, games, and everything else. As he put it

If you are an 18-year old today and you encounter a problem, you believe the solution is just a few keystrokes away. Google, post on a forum…no such thing as an obstacle you can’t get around. But "they will miss out on the whole layer of experimentation I was forced to go through my whole career."

And with that, he built up a piece on his computer live, and then sang over it. Here's a little extract:

Jay Vleeschhouwer

Jay gave the view from Wall Street of the EDA industry. I'll cover that in a separate post.

Mmm, AI for Lunch

Tuesday was the digital lunch, focused on AI. I'll cover that in its own post. The moderator was Andrew Kahng of UCSD, and the panelists were:

• Vishal Sarin, Analog Inference (founder and CEO, neural network processor ICs)
• Andrew Bell, Groq (part of the Google TPU team in a startup they founded)
• Haoxing  Ren, NVIDIA
• Paul Penzes, Qualcomm
• Venkat Thanvantri, Cadence, the VP of R&D leading our machine-learning development in digital and signoff.

Denali, Disco Inferno, YMCA, and More

It's Tuesday night at DAC. That means Disco Inferno is on the stage for the Denali Party.

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