Entrainment & the Power of Sound - Part 1 with Tom Powers

This week on #ForWhatitsWorthwithBlakeMelnick, the next instalment of our #TheManyFacesofInnovation series, called #EntrainmentandthePowerofSound with my guest @TomPowers.

In this episode, Tom explains the concept of #Entrainment - the natural synchronization that occurs in the mechanical world; the biological world; the social world and between musicians and their audience.

Entrainment is natural ....and it is something that we've inadvertently lost as a result of the over use of digital technologies in the production of music...Tom has created the means for bringing it back using the very technologies that caused its demise...For What it's Worth

The music for this episode, "Doctor  is written and performed by our current artist in residence, #DouglasCameron. You can find out more about Douglas by visiting our show blog and by listening to our episode, #TheOldGuitar

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Transcript

Entrainment and the Power of Sound - Part 1

[00:00:00] Blake Melnick: Well, welcome to this week's episode of For What It's Worth, I'm your host, Blake Melnick, and this is the next installment in our series, the Many Faces of Innovation called Entrainment and the Power of Sound with my guest Tom Powers. 

[00:00:44] Tom, welcome to the show. I'm really jazzed about this interview. I loved our conversation during the pre-call, and I think our audience is really gonna dig this.

[00:00:53] And I'd like to start, as I always do with my interviews, by giving our audience a little bit of background about our guests. So [00:01:00] maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself, what you've been doing in your career, and then we can move directly into talking about the research that you've been doing around sound and the impact that this will have potentially on the music industry, but also on many other industries as well. 

[00:01:16] Tom Powers: Sure thing. Well, first off, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here. A little bit about myself. I graduated college in 1991 and around 1989 is when I started getting into audio. So I actually learned audio production while I was still in school. I was a graduate of UW Whitewater, which is in the southern part of Wisconsin.

[00:01:36] And because of its location, I was an hour away from Milwaukee, an hour away from Madison, about an hour and a half away from Chicago. And in the late eighties and early nineties, I started doing studio work and I had friends that were interns, so they kind of got me into some pretty decently named studios.

[00:01:55] And I started watching and learning and picking up all the tricks and [00:02:00] techniques what do you do and what don't you do? When I graduated college, I ran a professional sound and light company live sound from 91 to 2004.

[00:02:10] And for 10 years of that, we had a rig that we carried around with us that we called Bring the Studio to the artist. So, instead of the artists having to book Studio Time, I wrote a 24 channel dat rig, digital audio tape rig, right to their location, micd them up and did the recordings right there.

[00:02:29] That worked incredibly well. However, it was a lot of gear to move around and a lot of work. So around 2000 I had to make a decision do I want to get married and raise a family and actually provide decent income, or do I wanna stay in music? At that time I actually found out a cybersecurity firm.

[00:02:47] And for the last 23 years been running that and I'm now into the second phase of life. So what's happening is I'm steadily moving out of the cybersecurity realm because it is a younger man's game. And I never stopped doing [00:03:00] audio. I was always doing contract audio or live work. At nights and weekends.

[00:03:03] I was just no longer the full-time gig. So I said, you know what? I really want to get back into, full-time work. The landscape has changed. It's radically different than what it, was when I stepped out of full-time. So I said, okay, you know what? There's a possibility I may want to teach as well, so I should probably go back and get a master's degree.

[00:03:24] Right? Cause you need that piece of paper to even become an adjunct professor, . So I ended up starting my master's degree in fall of 2021, and right now is spring , of 2023. And then I'll be graduating.

[00:03:37] My degree is in audio technology. Surprising emphasis on . Yeah, emphasis on studio and production. I've converted one of the rooms off the house here into a treated studio. And started mixing and mastering, at a greater rate, more advanced rate than I used to do for people all over the world because what I was finding out was there, especially [00:04:00] after C O V I D. There are artists everywhere, there's some people making some great music, but the production and the mixing and the matching is terrible.

[00:04:08] Blake Melnick: How has the recording industry changed the recording of music changed as a result of the advent of digital technologies?

[00:04:16] Tom Powers: I'll put it this way. What we used to do, we don't do anymore. And what I mean by that is in the olden days, you'd have a band that would come into a studio, right? So you'd book studio time, everybody would show up. You had the big console, the tape decks. And it was great. And people were prepared.

[00:04:34] And they went in and they played the music and they cut the tracks and it was very efficient. And we went through all the mix downs. And that was the process. It was really the process from the fifties to about, eh, I'd say 1995. So what happened around the mid nineties, mark? Well, the rise of digital audio workstations happened, right?

[00:04:52] You started this digital design and pro tools and all this kind of stuff come out and all of a sudden you didn't have to [00:05:00] be in the studio anymore. And the more that the digital. Age came about, the more we diverted away from that original environment where everybody was in the same room, or at least they could see each other and they were playing together.

[00:05:13] To now where you could have some guy in his bedroom cutting tracks another guy in, his basement cutting tracks. They don't have to be in the same city or state or even country. To put it in a nutshell, what we used to do sounded live. It sounded like we were all there and Right. We could get into it, we could understand it, and it was natural sounding. Mm-hmm. . But when you started breaking it all up and people are recording stuff at different times and click tracks and all of that kind of thing going on, , and then the rise of autotune and quantization and trying to make songs absolutely perfect, it created a different sound.

[00:05:48] People don't respond to that sound the way that they used to pre 1995. . 

[00:05:54] Blake Melnick: Given all of this new technology, people are recording in their basements. There's been a, I guess you could call it a [00:06:00] democratization of the recording industry, empowering individuals to record their own stuff, but how has it affected how the musicians are approaching creating music, first off, and then, in terms of creating music for recording? 

[00:06:15] Tom Powers: My observation is this, back when you had to go into the studio and you were getting charged by the hour, musicians were far more prepared, right? They came in, they knew their stuff, they'd. , if they made a mistake or two, you'd cut a second copy or dub something in, cut the tracks and you got out.

[00:06:33] Right Now with digital audio, people are endlessly fiddling with stuff constantly going back. It's like they never finish anything. I know. I feel the same way. I've been in . There you go. I've been in sessions where people literally, almost seems like they're writing the stuff as I'm sitting there.

[00:06:49] Right. I was like, what is going on? And because you can have 95 different takes and it doesn't cost you anything, the planning has gone away. And then the secondary side of that is a lot of it is in [00:07:00] isolation. One of the best things that you could ever do when you're going into studios actually work with either a talented engineer or a producer that was there that could say, yeah, that needs to be touched up, or we should probably go this route with that, or Let's try to approach the chorus in this way.

[00:07:16] All of that is gone. You mentioned it was sort of a democratization of this music, and in the sentence it is. However, there's also a flood of mediocrity that's been thrown out there. Right. And the real talented artists are having trouble rising to the top.

[00:07:31] Blake Melnick: I agree there for sure. There's so much out there demanding our attention that it's really hard to separate what's good from what's not so good. 

[00:07:39] There's a lot of records that I remember growing up that were, , spontaneous. I'm thinking of things like super Sessions that Al Cooper and Mike Bloomfield Sure. Did. Which was as they described, it's something that happened late at night.

[00:07:51] They all decided to get together and set up , a bunch of mics, and record this late night session . And it has become sort of one of the [00:08:00] quintessential, I think, live records of all time just because it was spontaneous in, its generation. What you're saying, , is that, What we're seeing now is that lack of spontaneity, that natural sound as it would come out as people were inspired to play together.

[00:08:15] Tom Powers: I think a lot of that has gone away and, we replaced it with the ability to work with anybody on the planet, and there's benefits to that.

[00:08:22] Mm-hmm. . But even if you were working with people, you know, look at Van Halen one, right? They basically put themselves in a room at Sunset Sound and press the record button. Right. And that album was amazing. But Van Halen was a fantastic club band, right? First, right, right.

[00:08:39] Mm-hmm. . And that energy that they have had at the time, uh, they brought that into the studio. And because they were together and they were in the same room where they're at least, working together in the same environment that energy came across. Right, right. Add in the fact that you're in the same room and you have all the reflections going on, and it [00:09:00] sounds like you're sitting right front stage.

[00:09:02] Blake Melnick: I think you're right. We don't hear a lot of that these days. So now I wanna shift over to the listeners. So how has this digitization impacted the listener? How we listen to, how we perceive, how we remember or recall music? 

[00:09:17] Tom Powers: There's a concept out there of something called entrainment. Mm-hmm. Entrainment is effectively when you synchronize with something else, when two autonomous systems that operate on the same frequency synchronize with each other.

[00:09:29] And what happens is, I want you to think of, if you go to a concert and you're listening to the music and you're just like, oh, this is awesome, man. You get into it and you start bobbing your head or tapping your foot or clapping your hands or dancing or singing or whatever. On a biological level, there's actually something happening, right?

[00:09:47] Your heart rate is changing. Your breathing rate changes. Your brain waves change, and you as the listener, are actually synchronizing with the artist. Now, prior to 1995 ish, [00:10:00] the recordings that we have were very natural sounding because they were in the same room. You take a look at some of the pictures of Bob Dylan doing his recordings, it's him and the band and like 400 microphones everywhere,

[00:10:11] And they captured it all. Right? Right. You could say what you want. Maybe Bob Dylan's not the most exciting guy. There are a lot of people that don't argue he wasn't the greatest artist, but he was really one of the first guys in modern recording to start to capture the entire room.

[00:10:27] As opposed to Elvis with one mic in the middle of the room and everybody kind of played around it. So it was this attempt to try to put the listener into the environment where the musicians were playing. Mm-hmm. and, they didn't have the capability of breaking it up.

[00:10:41] And one guy can be in Atlanta and the other guy can be in la. They didn't have that possibility. So they were all together and they just recorded what sounded natural. Right. The listener hears that and goes, yeah, I dig that. I can get into that. Sure. And it's literally like listening to it going, okay, I'm almost at the concert.

[00:10:59] Right, right.[00:11:00] Now you take that room away, you take that, symbian. Environment away, you take away the ability to play off each other, as a musician, if you're playing and you can sync with what the guitar player's doing or the bass player's doing Right. You create a different, basically a different product.

[00:11:19] And if now the product has changed where it's all of these little pieces that are glued together, the listener doesn't get the same effect. The listener is listening to something. If it's been over quantized and extract to the grid and auto-tuned and compressed and gained set, all the things that we can possibly do to a recording, at some point it becomes a lie.

[00:11:39] Right. Right. And the listeners listening to something that's unnatural. And anything the ear hears that's unnatural, it will reject and ignore. 

[00:11:48] Blake Melnick: We discussed this a bit in the pre-call, but music has almost become. a background nowadays. Yeah. When I go to a party, they have something playing in the [00:12:00] background, but no one's really listening to it.

[00:12:02] It's just playing and it's this, as Frank Zappa, Dynamo Hum, going on in the background. And you could stop somebody and say, I was just listening to that. Who is that? That sounded great. Well, I have no idea.

[00:12:15] Nobody knows what the music is they can't identify the song. They just say, it's part of my Spotify playlist. And of course, the algorithm goes out and finds stuff based on what they listen to. You like James Taylor, we're gonna feed you a bunch of stuff.

[00:12:28] That sounds exactly like James Taylor. But the effect of that is it just becomes this background noise. There's no variance. And I'm assuming your ears just not picking up any difference. 

[00:12:38] Tom Powers: Right? I mean, that's one of the downfalls of Spotify is it's literally, selecting frequency ranges of songs that match but to speak to the production of it Ben Hunter, who's actually an artist that you had Sure. On one of the earliest episodes of your show, I think he coined it the best way possible. Music has been mixed to become unoffensive. Right. Right. Something that, yeah, you can have it on in the background.

[00:12:59] Oh, that's [00:13:00] nice. Right. Um, here's an example, so we talked about this in the pre-call. This is one of my favorite things to do to people. There are banner songs prior to 1995 that people can list off. You can go, you can dream on. And Hotel California Don't Stop Believing. You name it, pick a genre and people will go for ages, right?

[00:13:20] Now I ask 'em to do the same thing for songs post 1995, and they'll struggle to come up with five 

[00:13:25] or 10 of them. 

[00:13:26] Blake Melnick: But is that a demographic thing? 

[00:13:28] Tom Powers: I don't think so. 

[00:13:29] Oh, okay. I've tried this with multiple people everyone from my father who's almost in his eighties, to my sons and their friends as they were growing up.

[00:13:39] . It was very interesting when I would play different songs for high school friends that were in the band with my sons, for example. Right. And I wanted to see what the difference was. So I might take It's Not the Crime by Tower of Power.

[00:13:54] Right. A fantastic tune. Mm-hmm. It's like literally like you're sitting next to Doc Kupka and the [00:14:00] Sax, play that and then, play a Taylor Swift song or something along those lines. Something that's new. And watch the difference.

[00:14:08] Inevitably, the newer music had a, oh, that's nice type of response, but you play something like it's not the crime or soul with a capital S or something like that. Something these kids have never heard before. And all of a sudden, like, what is this? So it wasn't an age thing and it wasn't a demographic thing, it was basically as the music came across, did it sound natural or did it sound like background noise?

[00:14:36] Blake Melnick: I want to jump to talk about your hypothesis and what began this whole journey of innovation. Yeah. And, , you gave me some background on entrainment. I've done some reading about it. Fascinating. So let's sort of shift over to that a little bit, because I think, okay, this is really what we're talking about is the loss of entrainment, when we're talking about new music and over, overproduced , sound songs and that kind of thing.

[00:14:59] [00:15:00] You were a recording artist. You left that you went into, cybersecurity. You came back to your, roots, so to speak, your true love music and recording. But you had this idea and I guess it started with, , reading about entrainment. So let's talk a little bit about entrainment.

[00:15:14] Tell me how that all came about. 

[00:15:17] Tom Powers: The cybersecurity thing, especially for the last 20 some odd years, that adds an analytical approach to a lot of things, right? So I, I'm one of those guys that says, okay, I'm going to accept that this is how it is, but I wanna know why. How does that work?

[00:15:31] Mm-hmm. And I don't know, about 15 years ago, I guess, I was doing a course called Songs of the Nations by Dan McCullum, , out of Vacaville, California. And he had made a DVD called God Vibrations, spoke to how sound and, , the material world, or matter responds. And that's where I first saw this concept of entrainment, right?

[00:15:56] So I was like, well, what is this thing? And I go investigating it. And [00:16:00] entrainment again is when you have two autonomous systems that operate on the same frequency. come in contact with each other, they will synchronize without any sort of intervention. Right, right. This was originally discovered by Christian Hugins, in the 17th century.

[00:16:17] He's the inventor of the pendulum clock. Hmm. And what he had was he had two identical clocks that he had made and kicks off the pendulums and leaves the room, comes back about a half hour later and the pendulums are in sync. And first time that he's ever seen anything like this and it's hilarious.

[00:16:36] I read an article, about how he went through his process to test this and his first instinct was that the place was haunted . Right. Of course, something had go course wouldn't do that and changed it. But being a little bit more of a, mechanical guy, like there's something going on here.

[00:16:50] And he's the one who really tapped it and actually coined the term entrainment. And it was on mechanical level. So as long as there was some sort of medium between the two clocks, they would synchronize. [00:17:00] Fast forward a couple hundred years and. entrainment is widely accepted. 

[00:17:06] It's in the mechanical world, it's in the biological world, it's in the social sciences, it's everywhere. So what we start to see is it is natural for us to want to synchronize with something. In fact, we do it and don't even know it. If you walk down the street, your right hand goes out the same time your left foot does.

[00:17:25] And your left hand goes out the same time your right foot does. You're not thinking of doing that. It's just natural right into your body entrainment. the very interesting thing was that until about 2000, nobody really applied this concept of entrainment to music. Right. And. 2004, a guy named Martin Clayton and a whole bunch of other folks from Durham University, started investigating entrainment in music.

[00:17:52] All right? And, they coined the term. interpersonal musical entrainment. They're really describing what [00:18:00] happens when people deal with, music that they hear and what happens underneath, basically under the hood, if you will. Right. , they actually called it ethnomusicology.

[00:18:09] So they were across all sorts of genres of music and, different parts of the countries and it was amazing. After you read the first document that they did, which was I think about like 85 pages, it was just a massive, writing that they put out there. Since then, I had just looked it up because I cited it in my thesis.

[00:18:28] It's been cited like 15 or 1600 times in the last 20 years. And they basically said, when you have an artist playing music, his audience. will synchronize to the feelings and rhythms that he's putting out there, and the music is the medium. Sure. And I thought that was absolutely fascinating. 

[00:18:50] Just so I get my head around this whole, , idea of entrainment, it happens with mechanical objects, it happens with people. It happens in the relationship between [00:19:00] the artist who's playing live in front of the audience. but does it apply to things like language, for example?

[00:19:06] So if you have a bunch of people in the room together and they're having a conversation, they spend a lot of time together. I've noticed this just anecdotally, that all of a sudden the way they talk becomes similar. , the language, the words, the phraseology that they use becomes similar. And then it goes away when they move from one group to another.

[00:19:26] So was that entrainment too? . 

[00:19:28] Sure, yeah. The cadence of how they speak definitely will change. There are, entrainment in social sciences is absolutely astounding. As far as how much do we learn from our environment, how much do we mimic it, how much is happening underneath and 

[00:19:44] and what you're describing in social interactions definitely happens. There's a term they called chameleon effect that was describing, what you're talking about there. When somebody starts speaking with their hands or nodding their head as they talk mm-hmm.

[00:19:58] you'll actually parrot it. Right? [00:20:00] Right. Unconsciously, you'll start nodding your head, in fact, there's a sales technique. When I came outta college, I did a little insurance sales and one of the sales techniques was if I wanted you to agree with something as I spoke about it, I was nodding my head and you'd start naturally nodding your head, don't make your head chair.

[00:20:14] Yeah. It's real difficult to say, no, I don't want that. If you're nodding your head. But in effect, entrainment was going on at that point. Right. 

[00:20:22] Blake Melnick: So I want to talk a little bit about the conductor, cuz the reading that I did in the background said, originally thought entrainment was carried through the air and then they later , discovered that it was no, it's actually the object.

[00:20:35] Using your example of the two clocks, it wasn't the fact that one clock was somehow speaking to the other, or that the conductor was the air itself, but it was the surfaces. So you really had to have the clocks in the same location and it was the sound bouncing off the surfaces.

[00:20:52] Is that correct? , 

[00:20:52] Tom Powers: So in the mechanical world, there had to be some sort of commonality between them. Something, how they could communicate. And obviously [00:21:00] since a machine can't listen, it had to have some sort of feedback to it.

[00:21:03] Right. So yeah, if they were on the same table, , the table surface allowed them to communicate 

[00:21:07] Blake Melnick: to each other. Right. . So the vibrations through the surfaces and things like that. 

[00:21:12] Tom Powers: Exactly. But when you start getting into the social sciences and the music stuff, , at that point, 

[00:21:17] then language and cadence and rhythms and notes and frequencies, that becomes your medium because we can hear, and that is a way that we can intake data mm-hmm. And basically deal with it. 

[00:21:29] Blake Melnick: Right. , okay, so you started reading about entrainment, you have this background in the music business and the recording business. Was that the proverbial light bulb for you? 

[00:21:38] Tom Powers: You know, in the middle of one of my courses, in the master's, degree, something went off , and I made this leap of faith, if you will. Was a discussion we were having. I said, why is new music bad?

[00:21:53] And old music was good. Mm-hmm. , right. That's really where it started. Right, right. And I was thinking about that. I was like, you know, it's not like all of a [00:22:00] sudden people forgot music theory and they, they forgot how to write and they forgot how to make a point. And artists fell off the planet.

[00:22:09] It's not the case. I mean, something else had to happen. We got all of this music that's coming out and yes, granted a lot of it is untrained and it's very rough and, it is what it is. The decent artists didn't go away. So what's happened? What's going on? And started comparing a lot, like I'm sure you did after we had our original discussion.

[00:22:28] Absolutely. I have. You go back to your old music and you're like, okay, I listen to this and I listen to it. Now what am I hearing? And it struck me that, the albums that I was pulling up, I think the first one I did this was I took the Journey Escape album. And I played that thing.

[00:22:45] I said, all right, what do we got here? And you're listening to that and you're like, okay, that sounds like I'm second row, or that sounds like I'm sitting right in the middle of the band. And then I fired up something new by like Bruno [00:23:00] Mars or something like that. And I'm going, it's cool, but it sounds distant, if you will.

[00:23:08] Mm-hmm. , it sounds, it didn't grab me and I'm like, what is going on here? Why am I not connecting this? Cuz Bruno Mars, I mean arguably incredibly talented individual. Absolutely. I've 

[00:23:18] seen him live. He's great. 

[00:23:20] I watched him on the Super Bowl and this is really what kind of harken back to, I'm like, wait a minute.

[00:23:25] That Super Bowl performance he did. That was cool. Right. Why does his recordings not give me the same feeling? Right. And I started thinking about that. I'm like, you know, there's a lot of artists that I've seen live. And I go, oh, that's amazing. You can remember a concert from 10 years ago, but you couldn't tell you which album's out today.

[00:23:43] And you're like, oh, okay, fantastic. But you might go see the artist. They're gonna go, wow, that's amazing. What's the difference? , the older artists, you kind of synced up to 'em. I'm like, oh my gosh, I want to know more.

[00:23:52] And partially Spotify playlists I think are the cause of this. But we used to put on an album and play the whole record. Hey, listen to [00:24:00] all the songs. Yeah. Yeah. Now it's, you pick and choose and it's a schorge sport and you're taking the best and whatever Spotify recommends to you, which mm-hmm.

[00:24:07] which, eh, it doesn't give you the chance to say, what is the artist trying to say? And, , theme albums, like, operation Mind Crime by Queens. You know, that thing told a story. Right. You can't do that now, I said there had to be something going on.

[00:24:22] What was the difference? And I narrowed it down to around that mid nineties era. Mm-hmm. , Nirvana. And those guys were like the last to start. Doing it the old way and moving into the new way, smells like teen Spirit and things like that. And that's where you started to see it change.

[00:24:35] And then as I started moving into the two thousands, I was like, very interesting what's going on? And it dawned on me that, you know what, I didn't have digital audio recording in the late eighties. Right, right. We were doing stuff through console and, 24 or 16 track tape.

[00:24:52] And then we would do bounce downs and, I was using a try an a d B, at the Chicago studio I was working at, and I was like, this is amazing. [00:25:00] Mm-hmm. . And now everybody's got a condenser microphone on the USB mic and Pro Tools or garage band and off the go, right. And I was like, the process changed.

[00:25:11] Okay. So we are doing things differently than we used to. We're recording differently, the environment's different. What is missing? And it dawned on me that because the production is different, something is interfering with this entrainment, right? And as I thought about that, I'm like, oh my gosh, here's a perfect example.

[00:25:30] Here's a perfect live example. And this one really kind of drives home the difference in production. We talked a little bit. You go out and you see a live band, and that band is awesome. Let's say it's a great group and it's all original music and it's played very well, right? So we go out to the club and that band is playing, and they're incredible.

[00:25:50] And the mix is good. And you're like, oh, this is fantastic. And people are bobbing their heads and they're dancing and they're getting into it, and they're hooting and hollering and like, yeah, this is great, right? [00:26:00] And they come away. Remember that band we saw at club  ABC? Yeah. I love that group Now, same group, second night.

[00:26:08] Same band playing the same songs, but now the mix is terrible. Mm-hmm. right Drum and bass is too low. The guitars are too loud. The singers kind of nasally. Keyboards are kind of screechy. And what is the audience reaction? This band stinks. . What's, yeah. What's the difference? The difference was the production.

[00:26:32] The mix interfered with the entrainment of the artist and the listener. Right. And at that point I was like, oh my gosh, this makes sense because we've changed the way we do the recordings. We've lost that sync. Mm-hmm. . Right? And the more he started to dig into it, . The more , I started seeing, wait a minute, this isn't just music, right?

[00:26:55] It's happened in movies. Mm-hmm. . So check this up. Prior to the [00:27:00] mid nineties, you know, if I told you to sing the Star Wars theme, could you do it? Sure. Most every making it da right? Indiana Jones, dun dun, 

[00:27:10] Blake Melnick: pretty much same 

[00:27:11] song, , 

[00:27:12] Tom Powers: pretty much same song. Yeah. But the interesting thing is there's been like 25 Marvel movies.

[00:27:18] Can you sing any of those? Oh, absolutely not. You can't. And again, this was one of the things that we had studied in film scoring during the , master's degree, was to compare, the soundtracks of old to the soundtracks of new mm-hmm. , you know, how did John Williams and Han Zimmer and Danny Elfman and those cats, how did they do stuff?

[00:27:39] And then how did it change? And it changed from really moving melodies and punctuations you know, staccato and lagado and the different use of instruments to a more of a synthetic pad sound going on in the background. Right. And unfortunately, there's a slight nefarious nest to it where the music was made to be just slightly [00:28:00] recognizable, but not so much that took away from the movie.

[00:28:03] Right. You go and watch, epic Star Wars battle scenes, even if some of the newer ones. And you hear, you know, when the good guys are playing and when the bad guys are playing , and it's set the tone, ah, good guys, bad guys. Right? And you're like, okay, that makes sense. But now. , you know, you like, okay, I'm watching one of the Marvel movies, and now I hear a slight snippet from Captain America under a Pepsi commercial and I see a little star in a shield, and oh, I've I gotta put those together.

[00:28:36] And it's been done so that it doesn't distract from the movie, but it's still used in other marketing. It's been designed for cross marketing platforms. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. It just makes me ill. Right. Cause it takes away from the arch. Right. Right. But it is what it is. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's a welcome, welcome to the new world.

[00:28:51] Yeah. 

[00:28:51] Blake Melnick: Well, you know, so many thoughts are going through my head as you've been talking and I was thinking, the records that I like the best are live records. [00:29:00] They always have been. When I really think back on it, I think, oh geez, I can pick out my favorite records and almost every one of them is a live record.

[00:29:08] Little FETs waiting for Columbus, , John Males Jazz Blues Fusion. You know, it's a raw strip down sound, but I think what I like about it's, I can hear every instrument distinctly mm-hmm. , I can pick out every single instrument. And of course in waiting for Columbus, you mentioned the tower power.

[00:29:24] They played on that record. There were so many people on that stage, and yet you can hear every solo clearly. If you're a fan of the Sacks or the trumpet , or Sam Clayton's percussion work, you can pick it out 

[00:29:37] And I don't think you can do that with a lot of music these days. And the other concern I have is that what I hear in the studio or on the records nowadays, Almost can't be produced live. They can't reproduce that sound because they've over-engineered the record. And so when you see them live, it's a bit of a disappointment.

[00:29:56] Exactly, because they're trying to play what they recorded, [00:30:00] but they can't do it. 

[00:30:02] Tom Powers: Exactly. And it's sad. Cuz this strive for perfection, the modern pop sound. , the technique for modern pop vocals is literally go word by word and change the gain mm-hmm.

[00:30:12] before you do anything, could you imagine what would happen if you went to edit James voice and did that Right. It's like sacri yet it's the moderate accepted practice right now. If you listen to the original recordings by, Glenn Miller on Sing, sing, sing, the temple moves between about 110 to as high as 124.

[00:30:32] It goes back and forth. Are we gonna say Glen Miller's orchestra couldn't play no , but if you quantized that, it wouldn't 

[00:30:39] Blake Melnick: feel the same. Not the same way. And it's why people are drawn to the live experience and particularly in a post covid world. I know, certainly for myself and many other people I know, getting out there and hearing music live now , is kind of what they want to do.

[00:30:51] I mean it because, and I, and again, listening to you, I think it's because they missed that entrainment, that connection with the music. Yes, [00:31:00] you can listen to the records as lots of people have been doing during this, , COVID period, but it's not the same as getting out there and seeing them play live. , I've gone to probably 10, shows.

[00:31:10] , Last summer, just to get that experience, that connection with the artist. And consequently, actually, I find the connection stronger. And maybe it's because number one, the artists haven't been out there playing live. So it's nice for them to have that connection. And I want to talk a little about how, once we get into talking about the system that you've designed based on this entrainment theory, how that impacts the artists themselves , and the music that they're making, and hearing themselves differently perhaps, than they had in the past.

[00:31:39] , so, you've got this entrainment theory. You've read this, you said, look, this is something I realize now, this is something that's missing. We've lost this entrainment. So you've got this idea, you've got this theory, right? How did you begin to test your hypothesis? 

[00:31:56] Tom Powers: Well, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't deluding myself.[00:32:00] 

[00:32:00] Because you can talk yourself into anything. Rationalization is the second most powerful human emotion. Mm-hmm. . And I was like, well, you know, if I think my own thoughts enough, eventually I'll even believe it. So I wanted to start asking people, is what I'm perceiving.

[00:32:15] Correct. And without a doubt, it came back. Yeah. There's a difference and there's something else going on. And my next step was, there's kind of a way to fix this. There's gotta be a way to use modern techniques and get that pre 95 sound, that vintage sound. Mm-hmm. , you know, how can we do that?

[00:32:32] And I listened to a lot of recordings and the loudness wars really didn't help, because the more that you, you crank up a song for , its loudness, when you master it, the less depth you get. Right. So as that happened, it became very two dimensional. Right. A lot of songs have great stereo, but they got no depth to 'em.

[00:32:49] Mm-hmm. so. My goal was I wanted to create a mixing method that would be genre and daw agnostic that you could use over and over again. That would automatically [00:33:00] create depth and width and height in the mix. Recreate what is missing from those old days and put it into new music with the whole hope of fostering that interpersonal musical entrainment.

[00:33:14] Right, right. So my goal was to create this process that I could take these multi-track recordings and the issues that we've all talked about here, put 'em together, but make it sound like they're all in the same listening environment. And give the artist. The sound that the listener would pick up.

[00:33:34] And I can take that listener, I can say, you know what, you're in the front row, or you're on stage, or you're 50 feet back, or you're a hundred feet back. I wanted to do that and make it so that it was a process or a methodology or a framework that could be used over and over again. Right, right. Replicable.

[00:33:48] If you go out on, if you go out on YouTube or any courses out there, I mean, it's like a dark arch as far as, you know, how do you, how do you people get depth in your mix? Right. And I have seen some [00:34:00] really stupid stuff that I was like, I don't even know what you're thinking about. But, you know, the biggest thing is that, while everybody has these best intentions, , at no point did I ever find a course or a process or anything like that said, do this, start here.

[00:34:15] Here's your result. This is what it's going to be each time you do it. Right? And I was like, well that's very interesting. And , the process is built around taking all the multi-tracks and recreating the track processing that we used to do. So all the tracks go to subm mixes, which is the same effect as I record 16 tracks of drums.

[00:34:34] I'm doing two track bounce. And then I wanted to send them through a listening environment. So the process that we came up with effectively sends all of the music through a listening environment that I'm creating. So I have depth, so the things that are in the back of the room, silent, they're in the back of the room, things that are in the front of the room or the middle, sound like they're there and right, left and center spac as if the band was on stage and you're listening to it.

[00:34:59] Right? [00:35:00] Right. That's what this process creates. And I was like, well, this is very neat. and I said, I want to try it on people. And I actually, I started unleashing it on, some clients and they didn't know what I was doing to it, and they came back and said, this sounds great.

[00:35:16] This sounds really interesting. It sounds like I'm on stage and I was like, that was my goal. And then I said, here, listen to this version of it. And I made the room a little bit bigger and , I changed some of the timings. He said, well, it sounds like I'm listening to the band and I'm in the front row, right?

[00:35:30] Like, right on. Now listen to this version of it. He's like, this sounds like I'm in the back of the auditorium. I'm like, good. Okay. That's what I wanted. I was like, again, am I deluding myself? Let's test this. Right. So I started training other engineers on the predecessor to this. The method was called before bus mixing method, but it started out with three buses and 

[00:35:51] Blake Melnick: , I wanna stop you here just for our listeners, because not everybody has that technical knowledge.

[00:35:56] What is a bus? bus, when you say a bus, three bus [00:36:00] system. Four 

[00:36:00] Tom Powers: bus system. Okay. When you're working , with your digital audio workstation, A bus is a grouping of tracks. Okay. All right. And the four bus system uses, uh, compression tracks, reverb tracks, delay tracks and height tracks., all right? Or compression bus height. Bus delay bus, reverb bus. Gotcha. And what the design is basically to recreate a room, right. These buses mathematically actually relate to each other. Mm-hmm. . Um, there are a series of rules that we set up that as long as you stay within parameters, everything works great.

[00:36:33] Because when we hear things, our hearing is designed for a primary purpose of location, right. If we're standing in the kitchen and I throw a pot down on the floor, , you don't look at me. Your instant reaction is to look at where that sound came from. Where the sound came from. 

[00:36:49] Blake Melnick: Hmm. 

[00:36:49] Tom Powers: Yeah.

[00:36:50] Right. And we judge positioning of sound by one of three aspects. How loud it is, how crisp [00:37:00] it is, and how bright it is. Right, right. So in other words, if you and I are in a church and I clap my hands and we're right next to each other, that clap sounds very bright. It's very loud. And it's very crisp.

[00:37:14] Right. Using audio terms, it's got a highest pl a lot of the transient is available. Right. And the high frequencies are perceptible. Okay. Now, if you stayed at the back of a church and I go to the front of the church and I clap my hands, it's quieter. It's kind of muted. It's kind of dull. Right. Right.

[00:37:31] Using audio terms, lower s p l, reduce the transients, high frequency roll off. Okay. Right. So those bus systems are designed to recreate the environment or the listening environment that I want the user to have. Right. 

[00:37:52] Blake Melnick: So it's almost, like a stage designer, for example, in live theater production.

[00:37:57] Mm-hmm. , somebody that's designing for the theater is [00:38:00] thinking about all of these things, positioning of people, what's it gonna sound like if the actor is standing at the back or behind something, behind a screen, for example. So, same sort of principles, but you're doing this in advance.

[00:38:13] You're going, how do you want this to sound? Is this how it all starts? I mean, how would you like this to sound? Do you want it sound like you're playing outdoors? Do you want to sound like you're playing in a specific venue like Massey Hall, or Albert Hall in London?

[00:38:28] So there's a visual component I think to, to this as well, at least conceptually visual. 

[00:38:34] Tom Powers: Exactly. The first step in the process is you build a , tic-tac toe grid, Okay. A nine space grid that represents the front of the stage, the middle of the stage to the back of the stage, and the right center and left sides.

[00:38:47] And then you put your parts in it. All right. Alright. Kick drum back center, overhead right. Goes in the back, right overhead, left back, left. Guitar one. I'm gonna put him in the middle of the stage on the left hand side. And guitar [00:39:00] two, I'm gonna put him on the middle of the stage on the right hand side.

[00:39:02] And the lead vocalist, he's gonna be in the center in the front. And this harmonica player, I'm gonna stick him on the front, off on the left. Right. And it's literally like you would set him up on the stage. Mm. . 

[00:39:11] Blake Melnick: Yeah. Blocking 

[00:39:13] Tom Powers: It's exactly blocking, right? Yeah. And the, like I said, the original method was three buses and I trained 10 other engineers on how to do this, right?

[00:39:23] So recreate the method, gimme your feedback. And every single one of them came back and said, this is absolutely astounding. The stuff I've been messing with for six months, I got it fixed inside of two hours, right? And now I can create this sound where if I wanted to be in a bigger room, I just changed a couple settings and I'm at Albert Hall, but if I change a couple other settings, I bring 'em down.

[00:39:46] I'm at a seaside shanty in Ireland. This is great. Right? Wow. And. . And I said, well, okay, good. So I'm not deluding myself. And I said, well, let's do some market research as I was doing this, because I wanted to [00:40:00] teach the method to a figure out if I had talked myself into something that was legitimate or not.

[00:40:05] Mm-hmm. , because, , there's always a question, if you came across something that's never been done before, it's because of one of two reasons. Either A, it was difficult or B, it was stupid . So I wanted to see which one I was falling on. Right. And, and it turned out, luckily it was number one.

[00:40:22] And every single one of these guys, I was charging 'em for the time. And it took longer and longer the more I put into the system. Hmm. And by the time I finished with the 10th guy, every single one of 'em came back and said, you're not charging. Right. I was like, okay, market research is now setting me a price where these people say this is valuable and I would pay for this.

[00:40:41] It's one thing to say nice things. It's another thing to actually write a check. Right? And I'm like, okay, the more people are into that, the more validation I'm getting. This actually works. Mm-hmm. . So, throughout the master's, degree, I started, researching Psychoacoustic. And started really getting into, [00:41:00] what was it that was missing between the old recordings and the new recordings.

[00:41:03] And a lot of it is reflections, right? And there's certain psychoacoustic techniques that we've, added into the four bus system that recreates things, bouncing around the room. There are techniques in the process to actually leverage something called the precedence effect where if a guitar is on the left hand side of the stage and I'm mixing it, and I just turn it to the left, okay, this sounds like it's on the left.

[00:41:26] However, in a live environment, if you close your right ear, your left ear here is that amp. But then you close your left ear and your right ear hears it a little differently, right? Right. So I was like, well that's very interesting because the right ear is gonna hear it a little darker. It's actually gonna be a little time delayed.

[00:41:45] , Different frequencies are gonna come through on the right ear than they do on the left. Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm. on the left ear, it's gonna be very, very sharp. So some of the techniques that I created to support this not only would pan the instrument to the left, but now depending on what I did between the two [00:42:00] different multi takes of the track, I could literally rotate that amp on stage.

[00:42:04] And if I took all the panning out, it still sounded like it was on the left hand side. So the advanced work that we did on the four bus method effectively took us into that psychoacoustic realm where we were recreating what was naturally lost because of the multi-tracking in the digital age. We had become so accustomed to pre 95. 

[00:42:25] Blake Melnick: This concludes part one of Entrainment and the Power of Sound with my guest Tom Powers. Join us for part two of this episode on the next installment of the many Faces of Innovation where Tom and I discuss the far-reaching implications of his work for what it's worth.