From Music to Spatial Immersion
Greetings and welcome to my website! This site is a representation of my varied career with some insights into where I have been and where I see things going. Perhaps you find some shards of my experience and knowledge represented here to further your own curiosities. It has always been my goal to understand the creative process and consider mechanical processes to enable and enrich narrative composition and artistic collaborations. There are many sources 0f inspiration that can be pulled from our experience and the environment around us. How we compose should always have a lens for who the audience is and what creative levers we wish to pull to accentuate dynamics for peak impact and memorable experiences, even as the source code is refined from a personal private place of exploration. The compositional source comes from the intersection of one’s own space of possibilities (the aggregate of one’s experiences and genetic programming coupled with one’s available resources that open up the imagination), and the proximity of others’ spaces of possibility in the context of an environment. Perhaps I can help you to further understand new innovative ways to consider what narratives you wish to tell or what experiences we might create together.
Music Work:
I am primarily known for my work in music engineering and production. I received two Grammys for my work on Amy Winehouse Back to Black and was nominated for my music engineering work on Jason Mraz Mr A-Z. On the “Music Work” page of this website, you can find links to my extensive discography as well as some of my more recent work using Dolby ATMOS to explore and create immersive music experiences for some newer musical artists. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with some of the most talented artists and musicians in the music business. More importantly however, are the less celebrated names in the music business I’ve learned from, worked for and collaborated with over many years, including the great minds of Francois Kevorkian (DJ/Producer/Wave Music Founder - Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Yaz et al.), Goh Hotoda (engineer/mixer - Madonna, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Noko et al), Josh Deutsch (A&R extraordinaire/producer - Elektra Records, Virgin Records and Founder/CEO of Downtown Records, Premier Music Group), Mark Ronson (himself/producer - Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars et al), Phil Ramone (producer - Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, Billy Joel et al) and Tony Maserati (mixer - Jason Mraz, Mary J Blige, Notorious BIG et al). These people were all critical in my career; I am grateful to all of them for the tremendous knowledge passed on over the years and the many opportunities they afforded me. One of the great pleasures of working in music is having the opportunity to work with people completely and manifestly committed to their work above all else: these people keep inspiration alive.
Additionally, over the course of many years, I have been part of beta testing teams for Avid’s ProTools and many of their 3rd party plugin manufacturing partners. In some cases, I was part of alpha design work as well. More recently, I have provided beta feedback to Dolby for their ATMOS software. This work is instrumental in crafting software that will work out of development and in the hands of professionals with a keen eye to serving artists first.
Working in music exclusively for twenty years was deeply informative about the creative process; the development of art versus entertainment; and understanding the real granularity of personality and expression that is only found with creators at the very highest levels of their profession.
Spatial Compute and Virtual Reality:
Currently my interest in narrative is how tradition passive entertainment experiences will be modernized for the new immersive, interactive virtual worlds that are being considered and created as we speak. Virtual Reality and Spatial Computing that are being platformed by head mounted displays like the Meta Quest series and the Apple Vision Pro, provide exciting new possibilities for art and entertainment. However, working in immersive spaces requires careful consideration of how audiences are motivated by traditional, primarily interoceptive experiences like music, film and art, versus the more exteroceptive, interactive experiences found in video games or sport. Interoceptive and exteroceptive experiences engage different parts of the brain with some zero sum game attributes: a focus on motor neuron brain circuits can be disruptive to ruminating emotional processes. For example, it is very difficult to break down into tears if one is focused on returning a serve in tennis. And sometimes this is good and sometimes this is bad, however such considerations are important in the compositional stage of art and entertainment in virtual, interactive spaces.
Education:
After 22 years of studio work, recording with some of the biggest names in music, I found myself inquisitive about why we do what we do from an academic perspective. I returned to New York University to study economics (the efficient allocation of scarce resources) to better understand social organization. The study of microeconomics left much to be desired due to its very blunt assumptions concerning humans being “rational actors.” This led me to study neuroscience and some psychology. Ultimately I found that behavioral economics, which is primarily concerned with how cognitive biases affect decision making, was what I was really interested in. In short, cognitive biases are mostly subconscious decisions we make to conserve expensive metabolic resources. These decisions can get us into trouble but they are necessary for our brains to run efficiently. I concluded my studies with my senior thesis, The Neurological Underpinnings of Consumers’ Role in Price-Stickiness that explored the importance of maintaining price continuity (ameliorating the influences of inflation and disinflation) for the purposes of social stability. This probably sounds rather mundane until one considers how societies break down rapidly when day to day predictions relating to satisfying basic human needs disintegrate. I graduated with honors magna cum laude.
Play:
Upon graduation, I worked for a brief period of time with a virtual reality startup called, Garou (now Mira). I subsequently created a startup called Kredd that was meant to be a mobile music production management platform. The platform was meant to make managing projects simpler for labels, managers and producers while tracking collaborating labor so that royalties could be appropriately allocated and credits properly tracked. When Covid-19 struck, Kredd was closed due to an unclear horizon for the music business and a lack of funding to keep the company alive. However, we did launch a short-lived YouTube channel that we used to interview and highlight the careers of some very well established studio musicians, producers and engineers.
KREDD App Prototype example screenshots
KREDD interview series
However, my prior experience with Garou had ignited a real passion for virtual reality and the exciting prospect of how traditional forms of art could come together in an immersive, virtual space.
In the past few years, I have been working both in Unreal Engine and Dolby ATMOS with the goal of presenting music rich narratives in immersive spaces. ATMOS presents a relatively simple method for experimenting with and authoring spatial audio (surround sound) that can be readily streamed on numerous music streaming platforms. Work in Unreal Engine is a substantially more complicated process both for technical reasons and for narrative reasons: not only does the music have to be spatialized, but the “player” needs to have some reason to be in the virtual space related to the music.
Lost in modern music streaming is the trans media experience of album artwork that came with pressed vinyl. Before us lies a huge opportunity to pay homage to the vinyl of yesteryear where the consumer imagined their auditory experience through the artwork of a music album. Many will agree that the album artwork, outside of the music itself, is what made the music album the core connective tissue that bound musicians with their fans. Immersive worlds allow us to reengage that value proposition. Rather than trying to recreate the classic music album in some cheap digital form, premium artists will have the possibility to inspire and envelop their audience with a new kind of experience: The Music Album of the 21st Century. Imagine album artwork in an artist hosted virtual space. As headsets like the Oculus Quest and Apple Vision Pro evolve and technology for graphics chips and artificial intelligence take massive leaps, the future of immersive storytelling promises to be exciting and rich.
I am currently using my Maison_Merrick project to experiment with creative minds across creative and artistic disciplines. Part of this project is putting a framework around how and why people invent narratives for expression and social organization. The intention is to use CASSM (details on the CASSM page) to work with and push artists for the purposes of artistic exploration in virtual spaces.
Utilizing CASSM, game design discipline, video game engines (like Unreal Engine), AI and traditional media and art canvases, I look forward to collaborating with enthusiastic, future leaning artists to transform how we experience the decoration of knowledge in this new age of virtual reality and spatial computing.
