Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Dolby

Dolby is describing a dirty little secret of immersive media: our brains are easy to seduce, and sound is the quickest con artist in the room. Coming from a musician who helped define slick, synthetic pop, the line lands as both confession and critique. He’s not marveling at pristine craft; he’s noticing how even half-baked audio flips VR from tech demo to lived-in place.

The intent is practical, almost reportorial: audio is leverage. But the subtext is sharper. VR culture loves to fetishize visuals - resolution, frame rates, photorealism - while treating sound as an accessory you bolt on later. Dolby’s aside, “even though the audio didn’t feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it,” is a backhanded compliment that exposes the medium’s priorities. The industry is chasing the eye and neglecting the ear, yet the ear still does disproportionate emotional labor.

Context matters: Dolby isn’t an awe-struck outsider. He’s spent a career engineering feeling through texture, space, and illusion, from studio trickery to the early marriage of music and machines. He knows that audio doesn’t just decorate an image; it supplies physics (distance, scale), mood (threat, comfort), and continuity (the sense that you’re inside a coherent world). VR without sound is a mannequin. Add even clumsy ambience, and suddenly there’s a pulse.

It’s also a quiet provocation to makers: imagine what happens when someone actually shows up with ears, taste, and intent.