 So the club is called Berkeley XR and the idea is to inspire other students to create and to use this new platform to design, create and compose music and art. So every week we would show them different kind of gear or different kind of softwares or different kind of games and experiences that you can do in virtual reality and hope that some of them will find it so inspiring that they would want to build something by themselves. And I help a lot of my students build their project. They come to me with a prototype or an idea and I just go with them through the stages of how to build this and to make this into reality or virtual reality. Boom! What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Don Sokian. We are at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge in Massachusetts. We are now going to be talking about creativity and music in the era of VR. We have Shirley Spikes joining us on the show. Hello. Hi, how's it going? Good to see you. Thanks so much for coming on. I'm so excited to talk to you. We have so much to unpack about the subject. Shirley Spikes, yes, is the CEO of Virtue Studios, President of Berkeley College of Music Virtual Reality Club and on the advisory board at MUX. She's passionate about immersive technologies and spatial audio, unleashing our full creativity in the era of virtual reality. And you can find the links below to Virtue Studios, to play MUX and Woojer and her Facebook page as well. So yes, check out those links. This is going to be such an epic convo breaking all this down. Let's, Shirley, let's start things off with one of our favorite questions. We love asking people. We find ourselves as stewards of Earth. What is your current take on the state of our world? It seems to me that the world is going to a place of valuing personal identity and discovering yourself with creativity and coming with the full potential of what a person can get on any kind of field. Yeah, that's what's up. Yeah, that's what's up. Yeah, unleashing the full creative potential. Yeah, and valuing the self discovery of people trying to reach that potential for me. Yeah, the process of finding out what we find to be most meaningful and fulfilling in our lives and then going after that. As long as we have to have these right physiological needs met, we have to have the right basic, the tools that are available to us. Yeah, but we always had that. But what we have right now, I believe, is the idea of you can want more from life and that's okay and no one's going to judge you for that. You can be successful and no one's going to judge you for that. Quite the opposite, they're going to help you become even more successful than you would think you would be. So it's an era of experimentation and trying to find the inner self of each and every one of us. Yes, yes, it's crazy thinking about the amount of, I believe it's somewhere up 1500 total billionaires on the planet and how it's just looking like as the pie of the economy of the planet is going to grow. It's going to be closer to 3000. And entrepreneurs and artists and people who want to make the world a better place. People who actually want to change things to the better and to the greater good. She's incredible. Yes, yes. It's like billions of people around the world gaining access to democratized technologies at the edge of the field. Exactly, it's amazing, it's a great journey. Yes, yes. And specifically, I think the technologies that you're going to be teaching us about in this episode especially are going to unlock a lot of creative potential. Yes, yes, let's do the journey. So, OK, when you're when you find yourself born in Israel and you've got you're going to have to teach us about kind of like the craziness. Like, I'm really interested in what this is like. It's so much different than, you know, being born in the US. That's true. It's kind of like a much smaller piece of land and it's true. It's a very, very small piece of land, a crazier part of the world. In some ways, yes. So teach us about that and how you picked up your your interest in music and then got out to the Berkeley College of Music. I I started playing when I was four. So I don't remember any time of my life that I didn't do music or didn't hear sounds in my head or didn't analyze whatever is on the radio. So it was always a part of my journey. And Israel is a very, very small country located right in the Middle East between a lot of Muslim countries. So we're one of a kind. I think because it's a very small country, a lot of people finding themselves through the entrepreneurial journey, just because we don't have a lot of resources and people are like, OK, we need to generate money out of our ideas, make sense, kind of software. Yeah, not only also hardware and also a lot of stuff, cyber defense, which is Israel is very big on. So I always grew up around entrepreneurs and people who want to get something more out of life. And I had a lot of people that told me that in Israel, you actually feel like you were living because something might happen to you. There are. Oh, yeah. So there are a lot of dangers in Israel, but but you learn to appreciate life because of it. And then can you give us an idea of like the density of the like of powerful nodes of like individuals and companies? A majority of them are in Tel Aviv. Is that Tel Aviv? Herzliya is a huge one on startup companies. A lot of like, I think that the top 50 companies in the world have already opened a center in Israel. You have a lot of incubators. There are a lot of headquarters are based in Israel. A lot of companies actually started in Israel. A lot of companies that you're using on a daily basis, like Waze, for example, USB thumbtrives were invented in Israel. Yes, yes. Yeah, and I believe sherry tomatoes as well. Cherry tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes as an Israeli invention. Interesting. Yeah, there was something like that. You're welcome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I believe it was the vehicle that made the the lane assist where they would prevent. Yeah, that company also. Mobileye. Mobileye? Mobileye. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have a lot of friends who work there, actually. Yeah, yeah, see, what's up? Yeah, what's up? Yeah, shout out to the Israel Tech. What's up Israel? Yeah, soccer peeps. OK, so then all the way to, you know, having since four, you've always noticed sound, always noticed sound. I always notice sound. I always hear sounds. I always analyze songs in my head. I always try to understand better music. I went to the conservatory in Jerusalem. I grew up in Jerusalem. And I went to the classical conservatory in Jerusalem. And I did a few classes also in the higher academy in Jerusalem. And then I moved to a school we call Ramon. Back then we called it Ramon. Today we call it a BIN school at Berkeley International Network School where all my credits got transferred to Berkeley. And I studied composition arrangement and conducting because I realized that I didn't want to just be a player that just plays to other people or play other people's pieces. I want to be able to create my own music. So I studied composition, arrangement, and conducting for three years. And after that I took one year off to study and get the money to get to Berkeley. It's really expensive, as you know. Yes, this is a very expensive school. It's a very expensive school. I am on a few scholarships, thank God. But it's still a very expensive school. And this is a top Berkeley College of Music is one of the top schools in the world for music. Yes, yes. Yeah. Frequently ranked in top five or so something. And it's worth leading in being the top one of music education and music technology. The first one to get a degree for film scoring. The first one to offer classes in virtual reality and in video games. So they're groundbreaking in a lot of different fields. Film scoring classes, VR, yeah. Yeah, the first one to get, I think, I think it was the first school to get jazz as a degree. I think the first school in America to get jazz as a degree instead of just classical music or traditional music. So it was always breaking the ground. Berkeley College of Music has been a little bit, I'm always trying to get in there and see what's going on. I'm just a little bit older than my country, honestly. Berkeley, I believe, was founded in 45. 45, interesting. Yeah, and Israel was founded at 48. Yeah, the founding of countries and yeah, countries and stuff. Okay, so yeah, cutting edge of music technology, you're out here now. You're doing electronic production and sound design. Correct. And you call this the biology of music, which I thought was so interesting. That's honestly how I see it. Sound and controlling sound. Yes, teach us about this. So yeah, I started actually studying film scoring and I moved to a different major, which is electronic production and sound design and I didn't even know what I'm getting myself into, honestly. I thought it was just going to be trans music or party music, but not at all. So the way I see it, electronic production and sound design is the biology of music, which is understanding the depth of sound and how does sound move through the air? How can I control it? How can I manipulate it? What does it mean to hear a sound? Why does it sound different when you play a note on a violin or on a piano, even though it's the same note? Why doesn't it sound the same if it's all just frequency and amplitude? It should sound the same, but it's not. So it's really getting into the depth of what sound actually mean and understanding how to design it and manipulate it any way you want. Yes. Yes, it's like taking God control over a sound. It's actually biology. It's understanding how things are built. Why does it sound good? Why does it sound bad? Why do we like something better than the other thing? Why does some sounds are natural and some sounds are not? And how does it move through the space? Yes. Yes, the same note on different instruments. Exactly. That's a good one. You also had all these other ones of which note to play. How long to play that note? So, yeah, one of the things, yeah. We work with MIDI controllers that allow us to control which notes you're playing in which specific time. M-I-D-I, for those that don't know, M-I-D-I MIDI controllers. MIDI, this is the protocol that we transfer audio from. And a lot of our students are actually designing MIDI controllers and different ways of how to manipulate and control sound. Using buttons, using breath control, using pedals, using virtual reality controllers, for example. So you could use a lot of different things to control and manipulate music. Yeah, because the days of the mouse and keyboard, those are like long, we're way going past that. Now, so teach us about how you would actually be able to do cool things like if you like the college of music. Yeah, so the way we see it, at least in electronic music, is less like a linear piece of music, less like this at the beginning, and then this happened, and then this happened. And more kind of like puzzles or blocks, that you create those blocks independently and then you choose however you want to build them in every different form. And you can play them in reverse or you can play them in the same time. And you kind of create yourself those templates that later on you're using for different materials. So the same song can sound differently. This is why we listen to DJs, how they take different audio pieces and combine them together to one big piece. Yes, yes. So then how does, how do I make one of these kind of like modules? And then how would you go about designing that? And then how do you plug that in with the rest of them? How can you make it go backwards, speed it up, amplify it? So we use something that we call DAWs, which are digital audio workspaces. Those are softwares that help us control, record, control, edit, and do any kind of manipulation that we want on sound. I'm using few different ones. So usually for live performance you would use a software called Ableton Live. For building patches and to actually understand the signal flow and the sound, you could use Max MSP, which is a very nice software that you can design your own sounds in. Other than that, there are a lot of different tools like QBase Pro Tools, Logic. Each one is using his workspace and then kind of create music based on the workspace that he chose. Yeah, the tools are so many now and they're just... So many. And they always come up with new ones, which is great, I think. Yes, I hope that the time that we spend learning tools can translate into knowing how to use the next gen tools because you don't want skills to just come off obsolete. Definitely, definitely. The way that we perceive music has evolved a lot from the single channel to the stereo. That is true. To ambisonics. Yeah. Yeah, so when we started playing instruments and starting performing as humans, we did it firstly in small chambers, usually in royalty families when we called it chamber music, like a small set of instruments that were playing a little and nice piece or a minuet. And then we moved into bigger symphony halls and we kind of tried to get the viewer to feel something bigger. And the way that the orchestra is sitting, the way that everything is designed in those symphony halls is so you can get the best sound possible. And they're sitting and they're spreading everywhere so you can get the entire feeling of listening to a symphony orchestra. And from that, we can go forward in time into recording music. And for start we had only mono. And we recorded in mono and we listened in mono to everything. And then came stereo, who changed everything that we know about sound. And suddenly, oh my God, I have two channels and they can move between them and I can like pan things into different speakers and each ear can hear something different. And then we moved into getting it on our smartphones and on our computers and headphones became like so much more advanced over the years. And you have now noise canceling and you have bone conducting headphones which sits not on your ears but on your bone conducting? They're cold, yeah. And they send vibrations directly into your brain without even going through your ear. So you can hear two layers. You can hear the real world and you can hear the virtual world or the non-existing world in your ears in the same time. And it comes to today where I think that our world is going towards ambisonic and spatial audio. So in the past what we used to have, we didn't have a definition for that but now we call it headlock music which is music that is just locked to your head. That means that if you hear something in headphones if you move your hand, if you move your head, the sound is gonna stay the same. Doesn't matter how you move. You can walk, you can turn around and it's gonna sound the same. And we took that and we amplified it today into ambisonic or spatial sound. So firstly you can hear the room and it sounds way more bigger in depth. Secondly, when you turn your head, the music is gonna move based on where it sits in the room. So let's say I have a drum kit right here and I hear it on my headphones and when I move my head, it's gonna stay in the same place instead of moving with my head just like we hear music on just with our ears. And the idea is that we're not only hearing left and right. We can also hear back. We can also hear front. We can also hear up and down. We don't have that in headphones yet. We're starting to get into that and understanding how to record and to get sound that is immersive into the world of virtual reality. The 360 sound ambisonics is so cool because we're talking, you know, what used to be we'd go movie theater, we'd go to a surround sound system at our house and we'd go, oh, it's so cool when you can hear the person walking from over here to over here. But then these are also have so much healing potential, meditative potential, spiritual, transcendent potential. I mean, yeah. Definitely. For everything. The experiences that we can design inside of ambisonic chambers. In VR, let people feel different places. Let people visit different places. Let people feel something that they've never felt before. Actually enhance them with sound. Movie theaters are already doing that using the Dolby Atmos studios. So what they did is they designed kind of a 360 environment with speakers everywhere and the sound just travels between them. And now the composer doesn't even have to know about this. You just have a little joystick and he can choose where he wants the sound to go. So he doesn't even need to say, now we want it on speaker number 17 and now we want it on speaker number five. No, it doesn't for him and you can make automations and you can actually make the sound rotate around your head or move around the space, which I think is wonderful. Do you have this simplicity? I just love the simplicity because it is really democratizing how easy it is to be like you're just like, oh, it's a joystick now. It's just thought and it's just like the simplicity for creativity. And this is so critical for human ingenuity. I'm really looking forward to that being unleashed more. And I want you to drop us into you being the president at the VR club at Berkeley College Music. That is true, so last year I started the club actually with my friend, Maxine Gautier. He came to me, we talked a little bit about the club and then he said, yeah, I need a co-president who would manage it together with me. So I started Berkeley XR, that's the official name of our club and the idea is to inspire- So XR stands for mixed reality, right? It stands for, okay, so XR is an umbrella term for virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. So a lot of people said that it's expended realities or extended realities or extreme realities and each time it happened, one company just coined that or decided that that's their thing. So now we just see XR as an umbrella term for everything that has to do with immersive technologies. So the club is called Berkeley XR and the idea is to inspire other students to create and to use this new platform to design, create, and compose music and art. So every week we would show them different kind of gear or different kind of softwares or different kind of games and experiences that you can do in virtual reality and hope that some of them will find it so inspiring that they would want to build something by themselves. And I help a lot of my students build their project. They come to me with a prototype or an idea and I just go with them through the stages of how to build this and to make this into reality or virtual reality. Yes, yes. So this is cool because you're doing what I think if we could get to more labs and communities, right? This is so critical. You show new gear and how those can make new experiences. You show 360 video. You show, you record potentially video games tell stories in VR. Of course. This is a platform that allows you to do whatever you want. And this is an exciting time because VR is so new that whatever you do in this field, you're the first one to do that. There are no rules. No one's gonna tell you, oh, this is the way to do things. There are no ways or protocols of how to do things. You can design whatever you want. You can come up with a new idea right now and you're probably gonna be the first one to think about that. Which I think is a very exciting time for everyone, for any kind of field to go into virtual reality. I've seen designers go into virtual reality. I've seen architects. I've seen mathematicians, physicists, doctors who use virtual reality, psychologists using this new platform to either tell their story, help their patients, help their clients, whatever it is. This medium can take it. You just need to put your hands on it and not be scared of new challenges. I love how you said the frontier in this field is that with only maybe a couple million of these extended realities, umbrella terms across these hardware devices across the world right now, if you have an idea for it, you are really potentially one of the first ones to have that idea for it. And then to actually be able to execute it, you're gonna be seeing tens of millions of people using these platforms soon, even hundreds of millions. And then you're gonna have a mass, you're gonna, whatever you build for it, hopefully will be part of a massive library that will be used by so many people. More than that, you could be the leader of that. You can determine this, from now on, this is how we work. You can actually change the history of virtual reality right now. Imagine that, any kind of field that you're studying, you're hearing about those breakthrough people who just tried something different, tried to break the rules and see what happens. Virtual reality is so new that anyone can have their place to do that. And I've seen so many amazing ideas. We have a student, for example, who is trying to visualize mixes in virtual reality, like how does a compressor work? How does a reverb work? How does all those tools that we're using to create audio, how do they actually look in space? I had another student who was working on kind of- How do they look in space? I'm so interested. Right? That is so interesting. I don't know. I don't know. We're gonna have to check up with that student. So he's still working on that project. Even just how the sound is being propagated through the room. We had people, yeah. We had people that did 360 videos. We have now the power station of Berkeley in New York. We just acquired the power station. It's a big studio that used to be for recording a lot of big artists. Like a Virgin was recorded there, for example. And today Berkeley is using that for recording music, but also for 360 videos. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This is pushing the edge even further. Yeah, yeah. How hard it is to be the first one to do something today. How easy it is to be the first one to do something in virtual reality. Think about that. Interesting, yeah. Do you want to really add another app to the app store, or do you want to potentially go and pioneer virtual or augmented reality? How hard it is to be the best jazz player in the world. How easy it is to be the first player in virtual reality. Just the first. It's kind of like Mars, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, be the first one on Mars, be the first one to call- That's another thing that some of my students created a tour on Mars through virtual reality so you can actually visit Mars. Yeah. There's so many that are working on the planets. Yeah. Yeah, it's so much fun. Visiting celestial bodies, yeah. It's so much fun. Yeah, the uses of this are so endless. And I really want to hear what your thoughts are on this as we're going to drop into the next uses of this for you, but what do you think about the human mind, especially the child's mind, like of course learning from a textbook versus learning from spatial intelligence with an augmented or a virtual reality. It's almost as though the brain is just going to be able to capture the knowledge so much more effectively. I think it depends on what, but on a lot of things, virtual reality can actually help you study, be more focused for start. We have so many distractions today and everyone keep talking about the distractions and the phone and the Facebook and your emails and everything. In VR, you can't do that. You only have a headset and that's it. Now you're immersed for 10 minutes and you're going to stay in those 10 minutes and you're not going to check your Facebook on the background because you can't because right now you're immersed into this new world. A lot of people have called virtual reality the perfect empathy machine. Yeah. Because that is the first time that you can literally walk in someone else's shoes. You can feel what it feels to be someone else to get out of your comfort zone for just a second from your own living room and to find a new story. So I think it's a great medium for storytelling, for sharing experiences with each other and for creating just new content everywhere. And I think that anyone can find something that he's passionate about and just bring it to the new world of virtual reality which is how I got into virtual reality, honestly. I just took my passions and I said, you know what, this is what I like. Let's let other people enjoy what I see as fun or what I see as exciting. Yeah, I can't get over that. When you can really get behind the eyes of someone you can really start gaining a sense of empathy and right now what we're doing is we're doing, oh, I wonder what this person's life was like the last 20 years. Can I really get behind it and try and understand it? So now you can. Now you can go as deep as even people that are being displaced around the world or haven't really corrupt governments are really tough ways to meet their basic physiological needs. That way you can potentially become more aware of that and want to participate in. Definitely, definitely connect people together. It's interesting, it's like perfect empathy machine. Yeah, I definitely agree that it can be a very good source for empathy. I also do believe that like eye to eye is just so critical like passing a good minute just like looking at someone else's eyes. You need to be very cautious with VR, that's what I think. A lot of people will use it for bad things. You need to understand the risk that you're taking when you're stepping into someone else's shoes. That's how I see it. There was someone who created a VR experience to show what it feels like to live in a hostile environment of domestic abuse. And in this environment, you're a woman being verbally attacked by your husband who is yelling at you and throwing things at you. And I've heard of people who are crying and people who really broke them down to pieces and you need to be very, very careful. The rule that we put ourselves through in VR is don't do anything in VR that you would regret in real life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything that you would regret in real life, don't do it in VR. Like if I'm not gonna in a physical world be like, oh, I should really know what it feels like to be physically abused by someone else. It's like, I don't wanna do it in the physical world. I don't wanna do it in the virtual world. We need to just eradicate that from our world. Or killing people. Or killing people. Just get it out of our physical world and not have to put people behind it in virtual spaces so that they can better empathize because we're changing people's physiology when they go behind the eyes like that. It's like- Yeah, and it could really tear apart people. It could tear apart people. You need to be very careful with that. Yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up. I think that's a really important one. Yeah, yeah, but okay, on a more positive note, we have, yeah, virtual studios. Virtual studios. You can find that link in the bio below. You guys won the reality virtually hackathon at MIT. Top 10 innovative ideas. The top 10 innovative ideas in 2017 and 2018. 2018, I won with a different group. With a different group. So that's still huge. You won twice in a row. That's lit. Thank you. Good job. So then this development of these immersive musical experiences, marrying music and VR. So yeah, teach us about being in the conductor's seat. That hackathon changed my life, honestly. They even called me the year afterwards to talk about my experience in the hackathon and invite other people. So that was my first year in Boston. I was here for two months. I could barely even speak English coherently. And I decided, you know what? I need to know people. I need to find out people. I need to know the scene. I need to know who is against who and who do I need to talk to. So I signed up for a bunch of hackathons and one of them ended up being a reality virtually hackathon. And I entered there and I didn't know anyone. I didn't know anything. I didn't know anything about VR back then. And I sat next to a guy and usually what I do is I just offer my services as a musician and as a composer and a sound designer and say, yeah, I can do music. I don't know anything about VR, but let's do music. And there was a guy sitting next to me and he said something boring about blockchain. I didn't even bother listening to him. And then he asked me, what do you do? And I said, well, I'm a musician. I do music. He said, oh yeah, maybe you can like design an instrument in VR that like, I don't know when you move your hands, it moves. And I said, what, you mean like a theremin in VR? And he said, yeah, just design a theremin in VR. And I said, why a theremin? If you can design an entire virtual orchestra that like sits everywhere and then you can be the conductor and then you can control everything just like a real conductor does on stage and you can like cue them and stop them and everything. And he told me, hey, you should pitch. And I looked to the other side and that guy was sitting next to me and there was another guy and I'm like, hey dude, I'm pitching, how's it going? And I pitched my idea and he joined me and after three days of work, we created the first in the world virtual reality symphony orchestra that can be controlled with actual hand gestures just like a real conductor does on stage. Yeah, I love it, I love it, I love it. Yeah, it's a Cinderella story of how I got into VR. That's what's up. Yeah, you're just, we, sometimes we need these, it's a reoccurring theme of people that sit with us on the show is these bits of stimuli that come from mentors or from family or from people around us in our environments that are just like, eh. Oh, you should do something about that. You should do something about that. Oh, you mean like, ah, oh, oh, oh. And so, okay, so tell us about, you know, the hardware and how I can just go, okay, violins. We're using the medium of virtual reality and we're using the immersive 360 space to design the entire orchestra. So you're standing right in the middle where the conductor is standing and you have your score and you have the entire orchestra just around you where the first violin sits right to your left and the last double bass is sitting right to the other side so you can actually, it takes away your entire space so you physically need to move your head to see everything which I love about VR. I hate when people just use it as a 2D space. For me, VR, use the 360. So we designed an entire symphony orchestra and we're using a tool called leap motion to scan the hands of the player and based on simple gesture that conductors do, we were able to teach people how does it feel to conduct on stage and honestly, to be honest with you, the best sound is from the conductor point of view. If you want to get the best point of view to hear a symphony orchestra, it's right where the conductor is standing. I love that, yeah. The entire, like, all the music just comes right to your ears. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, what a cool, yeah, and then if it's ambisonic right there. Then it moves with you, exactly. That's so cool. So if the double bass is sitting here, the cellos are here and the violins are right here, if you move your head, they would actually stay locked in their position, not locked to your head. And you can get the experience of how it feels like to conduct a full symphony orchestra. This is so the future of immersive experiences. It's like the ambisonics, the virtual reality, the spatial engagement process. These are all such critical ways to be able to unleash creative potential and it's, yeah, I love it. And you can sign up in the link as well. Yeah, yeah, you can sign to our website and we're gonna send you some updates about your game. I love it, virtual studios. Everyone check it out. Virtual studios. And then also on the advisory board at Mux. Mux, yeah, that is pretty new. And this is PlayMux.com. Yeah, so it's Mux, it's already on Steam, so you can already buy it. It's a game that lets you design sound in virtual space. So we're using modular synthesis ideas. So you're using tools like an oscillator or a cutoff filter or LFOs, which is a low frequency oscillators and you patch them together to create your own patch that can play sounds or you can trigger the sounds by yourself and you can create an entire show using just virtual reality. So I just got on the advisory board of this team. This is another really interesting one and we have some images that you can see embedded here. It's just like so cool how you can take and move around different pieces of music in the 3D space. And actually create your own instruments with your own unique sound. Yes. That's the fun part about it. Yes, yes, we were talking a bit about that. Also, right now the best we can do is really voice and you can do a little bit with other, but like to be able to really go deep into creating your own instrument. To feel like you're inside the track, like you're a part of it, it's surrounding your world. It's oh, so I'm literally, I'm in them. You're in the middle. You can just build it through the space. You can put it everywhere you want and then you can just step outside and build another one next to it and then connect them to each other. So it's all around you, it's surrounding you with sound. And I can move my character through it and be able to look at the things. Correct. And one of the things that we're working on adding right now since I got into the team is adding spatial audio to it as well. Whoa, so I can hear it. Because I think that this is going to be a few, yeah. And then the way that the pieces are connected, I can do something like create a different, rewire the connection from the way that it's moving every once in a while over here and it can just change. Exactly. So you can say, let's say you have like a constant sound of ah, and then you can take this and connect it, let's say, to an LFO and then suddenly it's ah, and it moves. And then you can control the amount of times that it do that. You can control the velocity of it. You can control anything you want and create your own instruments and understanding sound in a better way. Yeah, this world around us feels like it sometimes is being designed by audio and creators. There's so many things in our world that like when you pay attention as close as you did when you're four, you know, when you're really, really starting at a young age to start paying attention to how it all sounds around you and you can dive in by like closing your eyes. It's not as fun as it sounds. I love it. It's not as fun. I love it. We're aware of all this sounds like we don't have background music. It doesn't exist in our world. We don't have background music. We don't have background music because when we hear music, even if you put it in the cocktail party, we're gonna hear it right here. We don't have background music. It's not a thing that like exists in our brain. We always hear everything that is happening around us. See, but that's, I like that a lot, but I also hear that, hear you on how that can be. I love when people ask me, what is your favorite kind of music or what do you like to listen to? And I say, nothing. Are you crazy to listen to music on my free time? You know how much music I listen to and I'm at work? No, I want to rest. I want to listen to silence. Yeah, yeah, that's that. I want to listen to silence. When I'm resting, I want to listen to absolute silence. Yeah, what are those anechoic chambers? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get locked into the mouth. We're just going to the studio like, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Noise canceling, ah, yeah. No, but I don't listen to music on my own time. On my free time. That's such, yeah, that's like, yeah, when you're, it's like whatever field you're in, if you're doing that field, even like before you sleep, when you wake up in the morning, it's like, you're an entrepreneur then, right? Or like, what's the, how would it, yeah. You know what happens when I listen to music? I would listen to a song and then I would say, ah, that's kind of a catchy song. That's nice. That's a cool song. Ah, they did this, ah, okay. And then they used this. Ah, I would have used it differently. I would have like designed it like this and I would maybe like add a violin here or maybe like some horns over there or maybe it's some drums. Oh, I know a drummer that I can call. You know what? I can book the studio for next week and then I can record this and maybe then we can call the singer to do the arrangement and then like we can, yeah, yeah, that could actually work and that happens every three minutes. Every time a song changes. Every time a song changes, it's ah, ha, ha, ha. Every time. Yeah, and meanwhile I'm over here like, ah, yeah, yeah, I like, ah, there's music. I didn't even notice that. I just left like Spotify on. Yeah. I fall asleep on Spotify like. Yeah, yeah, that's very funny, your analysis. Yeah, when you go really deep in a field then everything is like you're like, you're biologist, you're like, you're aware of that. And yeah, yeah, everything's skin. Yeah, it's all, it all becomes in a sense your field that you're going deep in. Okay, now let's do Woojer. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, so teach us about this. This is an Israeli company and this has a crazy haptic feedback suit. You can feel sound. It is. So I'm working on the content creation for this company and they're called Woojer and they've created two things. Firstly, they created a haptic feedback strap that you can put on you and then they created a bigger one that is called the Woojer vest, which you wear on yourself and it can take sounds and turn them into vibration based on the frequency of the sound. So you can physically feel sound and not just hear it. Yeah. It enhances all the experiences that you have, especially on virtual reality, which is mainly what I use it for. And we're working on creating sounds and libraries for them that can work with their suit. So you can not only hear sound but you can also perceive it as actual vibration just like you would hear it at a club. So the biggest difference between how you hear music in a club or how you hear it in your own headphones is exactly that, it's the subs. And subs are notes that are so low that our ears can't even hear them but you can feel them as vibrations. When you hear it through headphones the vibrations are not there because the sound is not strong enough. So you get the feeling of being in a club without it, which is really a revolutionary thing. Yeah, the feel as though strapping you into a Woojer permanently is fun because you would be like, you would be like, I don't want to keep feeling the sound on me all the time. How do you, yeah. Meanwhile, I would be like, oh, this is cool, but then event, yeah. And there's so many applications for this. So I was telling you a bit about David Eagleman and Neosensory and how that's interesting for people that are deaf that they can actually be able to feel the vibration of words and learn words. It's like new senses, right? It's a very interesting concept to be able to use haptics to hack our senses. We're trying to use it also for physical therapy, for helping with physical therapy. We're using it for anxiety attacks. Usually when people feel an anxiety attack they need something to hug them and to hold them. That is a great way to do it using the vest. We're working with blind people and trying to get them, get like a room scan and then whenever they get close to one of the walls, it would start vibrate on just one side so you would know that you're getting closer to a wall and you're about to hit it. So we're trying to find a lot of different applications for it as well as introduce it to virtual reality and music and virtual experiences just to enhance them and to get more of the feeling of it. Yeah, yeah, and haptics are also nuts because it is such a crucial part of our immersion into virtual realities. As soon as you can be completely strapped and when you step on the twig you actually feel it snap on your foot. I mean, we're talking like some crazy, crazy. Well, haptics I think is the hardest one to recreate in virtual reality because haptics is everything you feel. It could be feeling like a bump on your shoulder but it could also be the sense of hot and cold or the sense of fur versus steel or it could be anything. Anything that you can see, anything that you can touch need to have kind of a sensation and I think it's one of the hardest topics in virtual reality. But the Woodrow Company, it was designed by musicians, for musicians and it works on waveforms. So it actually detects audio and I think that a lot of musicians would love to try and use that. And then you also went and told us a bit about the way that this actually leads us into, this actually really interesting leads us into the way that DJs are now at venues and they have ambisonic systems that they can use. So Dolby Atmos is already open, I believe three or four venues in the world for spatial audio. That means that the entire venue is surrounded by speakers and the DJ goes on stage and he can actually create sounds that are moving through the air and they said that you just feel like you're inside the track. Just immersed inside it while you're in a club with your friends and suddenly a sound just comes and round around your head and just goes away. I think it's a very cool experience and I think that we're gonna see more and more of them over the years. The immersive experiences are gonna be taking a huge for old in society. Definitely. Definitely and I wanna hear some of your thoughts on the future of all of these technologies kind of coalescing, where do you see it all? So firstly, I'm seeing virtual reality becoming more mainstream and more people adopting it and I think that one of the fields that haven't adopted it yet is fashion and once fashion people with a fashion degree would actually get their hands on it and say, I can do it better. We would actually get fashionable glasses that we can all wear outside and we're not gonna look as stupid as we look now with VR. Cause a lot of people are telling me, oh yeah, I look dumb or I can't see anything with it. So I believe that this is gonna happen sooner or later. Also the hardware side of things, it's just like taking the compute off of the glasses and putting the compute in the cloud and then the 5G infrastructure and maybe- Definitely. I think those 10 gigs a second or something- Definitely, we're getting there. We're already in the place where our phones can run VR, which is incredible. Your phone, your like pocket computer can actually run virtual reality simulations. Yes, it's not the best. Of course, we have a lot of work to do but we're getting there and the more I see people complain about virtual reality, the more I just wanna tell them, just give us few more years. I promise you we're working on that, we're getting there, it just takes some time. But a lot of people are complaining that for example, you can't move more than one meter. We're working on it, just give us like a year or two and we're gonna get there. Or people are telling me, yeah, okay, I get it, you can shoot things but what else can you do? And really, we're working on it. You see me, I'm working on a few projects at the same time and inspiring others to create content for it so we can create an ecosystem where we all profit from virtual reality and then I think it's gonna become way more mainstream, more people are gonna use that, more professions are gonna use it, not just for video games. Well look, there's thousands for doctors, there's thousands for architects. They're already using that. Yeah. They're already using that. Thousands though in the library. Oh my gosh, look at the heart. Yeah, in Mass General, they're using virtual reality and augmented reality to treat patients. They're already embedding into their systems. For example, doctors who want to treat a patient but they need to keep clean hands but they need to write something down. Instead of actually taking a pen and paper just in space, just use augmented reality to write something in space. Architects, why show someone a blueprint if you can just let them walk in the building you haven't even built yet? Just let them walk in it, enjoy it. So I believe that more and more industries are gonna realize that this is the future and it's already here and you need to adopt to it. Yeah. And then I wanna ask you a couple of questions that we typically ask on the way out of the episode. This is gonna be interesting to ask you. Are we in a simulation? Are we in a simulation? Are we? I don't know. A lot of people have called me the glitch in the simulation. So maybe, maybe not, I don't know. Does it matter? You're smiling, you're having fun. Does it matter if it's a simulation or it's real? For me, it doesn't matter. As long as I'm enjoying the ride. Okay, okay. And how about what is the most beautiful thing in the world? Wow, that's, so I see beauty define, I see beauty, hmm. I see beauty as three elements that needs to come together for me. And I call them three H. So the first one is heart. That means that you need to have your heart in something and you need to actually truly believe in it and love it. Secondly is your head. It needs to be well thought and well processed. And the third thing is hands, which means it needs to be well crafted and well done. And those three combined together, it can create actual beauty. That's a good synthesis, I like that one. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, yeah. Shirley, thank you so, so much. Thank you. It's been so enriching, it's so enlightening. We have, the edge is being pushed, you are pushing the edge in the virtual outer space. You're unleashing so much of the cool potential that we have with creativity and music in the era of VR. I want everyone to take a look at Shirley's links in the bio below, virtuostudios.com, playmux.com, wudger.com, also her Facebook, go and check that out. Support support, go and keep sharing this type of content around. Get more people, our coworkers, our friends, our family, online communities. Just get talking about virtual reality, be that first in that career to be able to create in one of the first. Be the first, go there, don't be afraid. That's right. Don't be afraid of a challenge, it's gonna be worth it. That's right, that's right. And support the organizations and the entrepreneurs and the artists that you believe in around the world. Definitely. Support simulation, our links are below. Help us continue coming to cool places like Cambridge and conducting interviews and awesome people like Shirley. And go and build the future everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. We love you very much. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you soon. Peace. Good job! Woo!