Thomas Dolby wants to create new arts programs for Baltimore

You may remember Thomas Dolby for his ’80s hit, “She Blinded Me With Science,” but that was 1982. The London native had an entire second act as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur which goes a long way to explain why he was hired last year as a Johns Hopkins arts professor.
But that’s only part of it. Much of the rest was serendipity, he said.
“All of the things that have happened to me have been somewhat chaotic in their origin,” Dolby told a special “ExecBreakfast” session of TechBreakfast on Monday morning. “My message really would be to be very alert to those chaotic moments when the universe and the stars don’t exactly align, and something miraculous happens.”
He had many such moments of serendipity during his time as a tech entrepreneur.

We've got some really fabulous sound and production facilities here, and we want to get the conversation going.

Dolby tinkered with synthesizers since college. In the early 1990s, he brought those skills to the web. Dolby founded a company that created the Beatnik player, which sought to make sound available on the web through a new file format the company created called the Rich Music Format (RMF). When the company released the Beatnik player and a way to remix pop songs on the web, it was committed to democratizing sound for the web era.
“It was more about the art, it was more about the progress we were making,” Dolby said.

Thomas Dolby is at @TechBreakfast this morning. Taking us back to Winter of Discontent pic.twitter.com/GnN6BS3dND

— Technical.ly Baltimore (@TechnicallyBMR) September 21, 2015

Eventually, Nokia came calling because it saw the technology’s potential for ringtones in cellphones. Nokia wanted to work with Dolby’s top three engineers. Dolby thought it would distract from the company’s efforts to spread creativity. So his partner in the company suggested quoting Nokia an astronomical price that they never thought the company would accept. But, Nokia did accept the deal. And when the dot-com crash came, the company’s contract with Nokia ended up saving the company.
During the talk, Dolby showed a slide of the lesson he learned from that time: “Always quote them the ‘f*@# off’ price.”
Another moment of serendipity landed Dolby at his current gig as a professor in Johns Hopkins.
Since stepping down from Beatnik, he dipped into filmmaking. He had thought about teaching and applying for a job in Hopkins’ film program. But Dolby said he was really convinced about the job when he heard that JHU and MICA were looking to ramp up their joint film program, which will be housed in the Centre Theatre on North Avenue in Station North.
The building has a soundstage, editing suites and classrooms, but it’s not completely used. Dolby said that gives him a chance to create new work in Baltimore.
“The really exciting piece of my job here is I can help put together some pop-up programs, which we can take advantage of the production facilities we’ve got in this building while reaching out to the local community,” he said.
This fall, Dolby said he is teaching a group of kids how to make hip-hop beats. In the spring, they’ll be making music videos. But there’s room for more projects at the intersection of technology, arts or a discipline that may come from the community.
He said the film program tries to foster collaboration, and he’s open to hearing ideas for programs from the community.
“I think the main thing that we can provide is: we’ve got some really fabulous sound and production facilities here, and we want to get the conversation going,” he said.

Excellent @TechBreakfast with @ThomasDolby this morning! Last saw Thomas Dolby at @Moogfest 2012. pic.twitter.com/qwkUDDik3y

— peter churchyard (@codewizard58) September 21, 2015