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(( sound ))

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter “S” and the number “2” …

This past Monday we held our second official “sameAs” at the Old Crown in Bloomsbury. The event is the brainchild of my dear friend Matt and I, aiming to bring together the fascinating folks from our adventures (both work related and personal) and have stimulating conversation. Add to that a pub atmosphere, a flexible format and brilliant minds, wind up and let it go. The results and response have been absolutely incredible thus far.

For this event, we decided to take a bit of a gamble and toss a non-traditional theme into the mix:  sound. A day of flipping through our mental rolodexes and we had our speakers – each coming from wildly different backgrounds, industries, trainings, but all stitched together by a fascination with sound and how we can manipulate, capture, transform and analyse it. Personally, this event really echoed our initial aim with wanting to start this event series — bringing together folks who otherwise would not likely be under the same roof, drawing in those from outside the usual science and technology circles and involving artists, game developers, sound engineers, digital media gurus, etc. For me, this is *exactly* why we started this project.

A quick recap of the night, touching on some of the main points (videos to come, which I do hope you take the time to check out):

We had Nick Ryan and Paul Bennun kick off the night – Nick engaging the audience in a few exercises to test their knowledge of what “sound” is, this all encompassing concept that surrounds us and provides the daily soundtrack to our lives. Nick is a composer / sound designer friend and a synaesthete, realizing this a number of years back when he felt the texture of a garment and automatically transfered that into sound and color. He provided a  background on some of his experiences with his synaethesia, some of his work based off of that (which was absolutely stunning), and even explained things to the newbies in the room (//raises hand) what Head Related Transfer Function was. He then handed over the floor to friend and colleague Paul Bennun of Somethin’ Else, whom he’s been working with to create a 3-D audio experience in a videogame medium.

Paul heads up Somethin’ Else, and has been pouring his efforts (and those of his team, including Nick and the lovely Tassos Stevens, who also joined us for the night) into a labor of love project called “Papa Sangre“. It’s a game with no video – based solely on auditory response, utilizing the 3-D audio concept mentioned above. For a better idea of what I’m going on about, dust off those headphones, and watch this sneak peek. It’ll blow your mind.

From the world of sound design and gaming, we moved to big data and structural analysis. We were delighted to have Dave de Roure join us from Oxford, where he heads the e-Research Centre. Dave’s latest fascination is with a project he’s involved with (with perhaps the best acronym ever) – SALAMI (Structural Analysis of Large Music Information). It’s computational musicology at it’s finest, and even included mentions of Ted Nelson and the Linked Data movement  / Semantic Web. How I love SPARQL mentions 🙂 (happy inner geek, w00t). Bonus points to Dave for tying his presentation so nicely to the first sameAs on the Web, as well.

We concluded the night with the lovely Honor Harger, director of Lighthouse and co-founder of Radioqualia. I first saw Honor this past summer at an event dedicated to the power of the sun, held at the BFI to celebrate the birthday of the Royal Society. She showcased some of her team’s experiments in “radio astronomy” – taking the electromagenetic frequencies of the solar system and transforming them into a form able to be broadcast via a radio station.

She also showed a video by Semiconductor called “Black Rain” – an artistic interpretation based on the raw data collected from satellites. An absolutely riveting and stunning piece of film to watch, that leaves me completely awestruck every time. Here’s a snippet:

Many thanks again to all of you who made it out. I hope you found the night as engaging as we did. 🙂 Videos to come in the next few days, and do stay tuned for more on upcoming sameAs events. For December, we will be taking a break for our usual speaker formats, and heading the The Book Club in Shoreditch for a specially created sameAs sci/tech pub quiz. Trust me, you won’t want to miss this.

I’m starting to think that John is on to something – or else elated that there are other likeminded entrepreneurs out there.

Spotted this morning on TechCrunch TV, an interview with Tony Hseih, the CEO of Zappos on “happiness as a business model”. He talks about how things like the culture of the office and hiring as a process (the good and the bad) can really lend to internal happiness at a company. There are quite a few parallels to John’s talk from the first sameAs about being in the customer happiness business, but he takes it one step further, making one key point that I personally try to live each day (6:35 mark) :

Make sure whatever you’re doing, you’re passionate about doing it.

(I’m going to bold that even to hopefully help drive it home some more 🙂 )

But really, I can’t emphasise enough how important that is. Whether it’s customer service, disease research, government, science / tech, being an educator, you name it – it’s that passion that will get you through the tough times, and it’ll rub off onto your colleagues and those you interface with. And that is ultimately a very, *very* good thing.

Sidenote – apparently members of the Zappos team are on a 3 month bus tour promoting this idea of happiness as a business model. Nifty.

 

Last but *certainly* not least, the final talk from our inaugural sameAs on the Web. We were thrilled to be joined by friend and former colleague John Buckman – digital entrepreneur, man behind Magnatune and BookMooch, and Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I came to know John when I moved to London, funnily enough after both of us had moved on from Creative Commons.

Here he is speaking on what it’s like to conduct business in the networked world and the importance of patronage – as he so aptly puts it “being in the ‘customer happiness’ business”. I highly encourage you take a look.

Note: The next sameAs is coming up next Monday, 22 Nov at the Old Crown in Bloomsbury. The theme is ‘sound‘, the speaker list is top-notch, and well – we’re wicked excited. You should be too. 🙂

Thanks again to Steve Allen for the video.