"So a more sensible thing it seemed to me was to go to Silicon Valley and be pushing on the technology companies to accelerate the use of audio and music in computers"
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Dolby is doing something sly here: he’s reframing a rock musician’s midlife pivot as plain common sense, like the only rational response to the moment was to walk out of the studio and into Silicon Valley. That “more sensible thing” lands as both self-justification and quiet provocation. In an era when pop credibility was supposed to come from guitars, mystique, and anti-corporate posture, he’s admitting the opposite impulse: the future of music wasn’t just in new sounds, it was in new machines.
The key verb is “pushing.” He isn’t describing himself as a wide-eyed fan of tech; he’s positioning himself as an advocate, even a lobbyist for aesthetics inside engineering culture. The subtext is that Silicon Valley wasn’t inevitably going to make computers musical. Left to its own priorities, it might optimize spreadsheets and databases forever. Dolby’s claim is that artists had to intervene early, when standards, chips, and interfaces were still malleable, to make audio a first-class citizen rather than a novelty add-on.
Context matters: late-80s/early-90s personal computing still treated sound as a toy (bleeps, beeps, MIDI) while professional audio lived in expensive, separate hardware. Dolby, an early synth-pop figure already fluent in the language of circuitry, reads that gap as an opportunity. It’s also a bid for relevance that doesn’t beg for radio play: if you can’t control the charts, help design the instrument. The line captures a cultural handoff - from pop star to technologist - before that crossover became a standard career arc.
The key verb is “pushing.” He isn’t describing himself as a wide-eyed fan of tech; he’s positioning himself as an advocate, even a lobbyist for aesthetics inside engineering culture. The subtext is that Silicon Valley wasn’t inevitably going to make computers musical. Left to its own priorities, it might optimize spreadsheets and databases forever. Dolby’s claim is that artists had to intervene early, when standards, chips, and interfaces were still malleable, to make audio a first-class citizen rather than a novelty add-on.
Context matters: late-80s/early-90s personal computing still treated sound as a toy (bleeps, beeps, MIDI) while professional audio lived in expensive, separate hardware. Dolby, an early synth-pop figure already fluent in the language of circuitry, reads that gap as an opportunity. It’s also a bid for relevance that doesn’t beg for radio play: if you can’t control the charts, help design the instrument. The line captures a cultural handoff - from pop star to technologist - before that crossover became a standard career arc.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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