Sonicpress : So can we start by uh… just going over the basic differences between Mixman, GrooveGram, and Beatnik, the plug-in and player?

Dolby : Well, um… Mixman is software that's designed to let you create your own songs out of samples.

Sonicpress : Right.

Dolby : They can be ones from known artists that you buy from Mixman, or your own samples that you include. Um… And generally speaking, they appeal to like, uh… you know, semi-professional musicians, wannabe musicians, professional musicians, and so on. Um, the uh… The GrooveGrams are a really big… (getting very noisy in the room) GrooveGrams are really for typical web surfers…

(very loud, distracting, old media reporters talking on the other side of the room, we had to get someone to go ask them to please shut the hell up.)

Dolby : GrooveGrams are really for typical web surfers, so just in the process of surfing the web, especially if you're a music fan, you might come across a GrooveGram and learn very quickly how to use it, and make your own mix within, you know, the first half hour or so, and send it to all your friends.

Sonicpress : Cool… Now, this technology that Beatnik has developed, uh, it seems to me, shows a lot of faith in the common user. Uh, for instance, the "Lucy Pearl : Finish the Album" contest, um, presumes that there's going to be somebody out there that is going to be able to come up with a song that's good enough to go onto a major debut album.

Dolby : Mm-hm.

Sonicpress : Can you expound on… I mean, did you have a vision for empowering the public?

Dolby : Well, yeah, I mean, I think the thing about GrooveGrams is, it's kind of like music on training wheels. I mean, you know, you could click completely at random on the different buttons, and still come up with something that, that, you know, sounded halfway decent. So it's very hard to make a lousy mix. On the other hand, there's a limit to how creative you can get with it. So, very often what happens is that people's first exposure to Beatnik would be through a sonified page, or through a GrooveGram, and then if they go the distance, and become more expert with GrooveGrams, they might start to get interested in Mixman, which is um, more of a professional tool.

Sonicpress : Ok, so uh… The reason it's so easy then, is because of uh, things like, everything that you drop in will be at the same BPM, all those behind the scenes kind of things…

Dolby : Right. Right. And the levels and the pans and the reverbs are sort of, are preset. So the mix is basically there for the taking. And also, we tend to gravitate towards music which lends itself well to remixes. For example, when we did Moby, he sent over the tapes, and his whole song consisted of about six two-bar loops, that was the song.

Sonicpress : (laughs) Right.

Dolby : He, in the past, has… Like on his last album, he put a bunch of the samples on the audio CD at the end, and just said, "Here, take them, do what you like with them." So, you know, certain kinds of music like that, that have that sort of collage type approach to them, uh, lend themselves very well to this.

Sonicpress : So uh, you mentioned Moby, putting, just putting tracks out there for free, and I know George Clinton was very excited also, about getting his stuff up, and just seeing what people can do with it. (Dolby : Mm-hmm.) Um, do you see uh, more traditional musicians following this wave, or do you think it'll be kind of a separation of, you know, certain artists won't be interested in doing this kind of thing because they work really hard on getting a very specific sound, and don't want to see that changed.

Dolby : Yeah, I mean, roughly speaking, it's proportionate to age. Uh, although there's exceptions to that. Uh, you know, David Bowie is uh, gettin' on, but he's very willing to do this stuff. Um, Christina Aguilera's management told us that she is the next uh, diva, she's the next Celine Dion, and nobody messes with her voice, you know? She's eighteen or something. So, it's not strictly on an age basis. Um, what is quite interesting I think for more, um, more established artists, and the fans that listen to 'em is just giving people the ability to sort of go under the hood. Uh, you know, it didn't surprise me that the sort of video game generation would be into this. (Sonicpress : Right.) But what was quite surprising was that I had a few older fans, you know, Bowie fans, uh, say, "You know, when I see a rock documentary, a rockumentary about some, you know, Eric Clapton in the studio, you see this engineer who has the ability to just solo the guitar, or solo the backing vocals…" This one woman told me she always fantasized about sneaking into the studio after they'd all gone, and running the tape, and having the power to do that herself. So that's kind of the way that this could work. And so I think that a different approach to the technology would be to take sort of an informative and educational approach, where, you know, you have Eric talking about why he used the Martin, not the Gibson for this one part, or whatever. (Sonicpress : Right.) Um… I think that could be very interesting.

Sonicpress : Cool. Um, so in order to make all this work, you've developed the RMF format, which as I understand, is basically, like, a GM MIDI file that also incorporates samples of mp3 type audio.

Dolby : Yeah, it's um… You've uh… It's really a container for MIDI information, uh, samples, uh, the samples get appended to the sound banks. You have a General MIDI sound bank, but then you can add your own custom samples, via download. And it also contains interactive information relating to how the thing gets triggered, you know, in the browser. (Sonicpress : Right.) So, a GrooveGram, for example, is basically one multi-track file. Um, as soon as it loads into the web page, there's a sort of an overlay of the mix, which might be, "all tracks off." (Sonicpress : Mm-hmm.) But then as soon as you click on a different button, you're unmuting and muting different tracks within the file.

Sonicpress : And is that basically controlled with javascripts then?

Dolby : Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, with javascripts in a browser. Uh, if you put it in a shockwave movie, it would be lingo, uh…

Sonicpress : Right.

Dolby : If you… You know, we've also shipped in games titles, and there, it's like, C and C++.

Sonicpress : Ok. Um, how easily compatible is RMF with mp3, QuickTime… I mean, can people uh… How easy is it basically, to convert into different file formats?

Dolby : Well it's relatively easy to convert from other formats into RMF. Um, if you want to do something like a GrooveGram, you've got to have the original multi-track recording. You can't take a mixed stereo master and turn it into a GrooveGram. (Sonicpress : Right.) Um, but if you have access to the original multi-track, whatever format that was in, or the samples that were used, in the case of someone like Moby, (Sonicpress : Uh-huh.) then it's very easy to do. Um, if you have a standard MIDI file, you can convert to RMF, or if you have a .wav file, you can just do a straight ahead conversion to RMF using mp3 compression. So another way that a lot of sites are starting to use Beatnik is, is what we call QuickClips, and that basically means you have a page with like, a bunch of, you know, album art from different bands on it, but just by mousing over the art work, you can hear a short clip of the music.

Sonicpress : Ok. But uh, say you've got your RMF files; you've finished doing your remix, and you want to put it on your mp3 player and listen to it, you know, as you go jogging. Can you…

Dolby : Yeah… You can't, you can't do that easily.

Sonicpress : You can't export…?

Dolby : No, I mean, there's an increasing number of devices starting to show up with the Beatnik engine in them. (Sonicpress : Mm-hmm.) Uh, but, you know, if you took a five minute RMF song, which might be two or three hundred kilobytes, maximum, and converted it to an mp3, it would go up to five megabytes.

Sonicpress : Right.

Dolby : So, uh… It doesn't make a whole lot of sense um, to do it that way, and there's really no advantage over just taking it off the CD at that point. So it's the small file sizes and the interactivity that really make RMF special.

Sonicpress : Ok. Uh, do you foresee any small players, like this mp3 player that's in front of us here, uh, for Beatnik, for RMF files?

Dolby : Uh, absolutely, yeah. Whether it's uh, these players, or whether it's cell phones… We've just done our first cell phone deal, so uh, beginning next year, um, several million cell phones are going to start showin' up with the Beatnik engine in them.

Sonicpress : Are the speakers in cell phones good enough already for that?

Dolby : Um, you know, some of them you, you can hear like, if you see people sort of walking around talking like this into a cell phone. (Cranes his neck.) It's basically a little speaker like one of these (referring to the recordable Sony SR-1 Walkman on the table) or something like that, so… (Sonicpress : Uh-huh.) I mean, they're not really good enough for high quality music, but, um, a good way to view it is as a proxy to something else. It's like eh, if you were given a bunch of free clips of bands you never heard… Like you could walk around South by Southwest and have clips of bands pushed to you, and then you go, "Oh well this sounds kind of interesting." You go, "Hey, they're playing on 6th Street, you know, at 9:30. Cool." So, so it's really a proxy for music that you would get elsewhere.

Sonicpress : Ok.

Dolby : And you could also play little games, you know, you could make your own ring tones, you could do little trivia games around music and things like that.

Sonicpress : Uh, what kind of content is available right now on your, on Beatnik.com? Um, what's the range of artists, and also, the range of sample sounds?

Dolby : Right. Well, Beatnik.com today is primarily for developers. It's not a consumer destination site. There's a lot more traffic through Beatnik content on Yahoo, or MTV, or Barnes and Noble, who set themselves up as destination sites. Um, for the time being, uh, Beatnik is really for developers, so you'd see a headline on the front page saying, "How Yahoo Music Got Sonified." …what tools they used and links to the different authoring docs and things like that. So we're pretty much geared for the developer community because we feel that we have to get some penetration, you know, at that level, and encourage the grass roots, the sort of groundswell of being in development, and then also, you know, larger professional houses like, we've got people like Organic, and Razorfish, and IXL and USWeb are all… We're training them to do Beatnik sonification. And so, we're really trying to spread the use of Beatnik initially. Um, we may add a, a destination area to the site in the future, rather like Macromedia did with Shockwave.com.

Sonicpress : Right.

Dolby : Uh, where it's just about having fun. It's not about using a tool, or anything like that.

Sonicpress : Mm-k.

Dolby's PR agent : And there's also the Mixman community, incorporating Mixman as well.

Dolby : Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for Mixman users, they like to upload the stuff that they do, and have it voted on, and uh, get it commented on by, uh, by their peers.

Sonicpress : Ok. Where is that? Is there just one site?

Dolby : Mixman.com. You know, it's cross-linked with eh, with Beatnik, and a lot of Beatnik users sort of gravitate to become Mixman users. And then, in fact, once they get serious about making a living, professionally, from their music, they tend to come back and get Beatnik tools, and so on. And we just last month launched a B2B music licensing site. Uh, it's not retail Top 40 music. It's music libraries, jingles, sound effects, etc. So you can go in there and browse, and audition files and license them and pay for them and get a high res file on the spot.

Sonicpress : So people who are getting into the more pro end of Mixman, there are plenty of resources there available for them?

Dolby : Yeah. Absolutely.

Sonicpress : Uh, do you see, uh, in the future, adding, uh, movie dialogs? Cuz, I know I've heard, you know, clips from movies (Dolby : Mm-mm.) in songs before. (Dolby : Mm.) Is that something you guys might add?

Dolby : I wouldn't rule it out, um, I think there's a lot of licensing issues there. You know, I don't know if the movie studios would give up their stuff with no control over , you know, where it's being used. (Sonicpress : Mm-hmm.) But, certainly that's quite appealing, I mean, we've, for example, we have some sound effects from the X-files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Sonicpress : laughs.) on the site, and you could go and license those for your home page, legitimately, via deals that we've done with the sound designers. So, there's some precedence that we're setting, and I hope in the future you'd be able to go and search for, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever (Sonicpress : laughs.) and get clips from his movies.

Dolby's PR agent : We're running low on time, I hate to say this…

Sonicpress : Mm-k. Yeah, let me just wrap up with a final question here.

Dolby : Mm-hmm.

Sonicpress : You did something with disco lights and a drum machine? Can you explain that?

Dolby : (smiles.) Yeah, in my earliest recordings, I had a couple of modified synthesizers and a two track tape machine, and so given that I used that for drums, I would program the bass drum for a long time, and just sit there going like this (thumping his hand on the table). (Sonicpress : laughs. Right.) And then on the second track, I'd program a snare drum and go, "Ksh, ksh, ksh," like this, (Sonicpress : laughs.) and this is sort of, not very in time, and a little bit laborious to do. And uh, one night, I went out to this dance club, and I saw these flashing red and green lights, and I thought, "Well, how do they do that?" I mean, that's in time, you know. And I went to the uh, the DJ booth, and there was this little sequencer, effectively, it was a little sequencer, putting out voltages, you know, you could program the sequence of it and stuff. And it was actually designed to do uh, for Tangerine Dream's light show in like, the 70's.

Sonicpress : Whoa.

Dolby : And I used that, and I just sautered it around a little bit, and I got it to play my synths. And so, the drums on "She Blinded Me With Science" are actually being triggered by this sequencer / disco lighting console.

Sonicpress : Awesome.

Dolby : There were no PCs in those days.

Sonicpress : (laughs.) Thanks a lot for your time.

Dolby : Thank you.