Next Level Collaboration for Audio Specialists with Rebekah Wilson

Listen to the podcast on Spotify:

Holly: Rebekah Wilson is the CEO of Source Elements. She has also been a technical and artistic director and has worked a bit in music education. Welcome Rebekah, to the show. 

Rebekah: How wonderful to be invited. Makes me very happy. It’s great to talk to you. 

Holly: I met Rebekah a couple of years back when I was looking to potentially work with her at her company, Source Elements.  And since then have reconnected and would love to talk first a little bit about Rebekah, your experience, your journey through music and what brought you to becoming the CEO of Source Elements.

Rebekah: It’s quite a big question that spans three decades at the risk of telling my life story, which I don’t think is so much so interesting. I could do it in turn by topics. There’s two really big topics that are of importance to me. Music. I’ve been a musician since I was a child. I trained classical piano and violin and started writing classical music when I was about 10 years old. I grew up in the country in the middle of nowhere and I ran out of music.  And I think I just thought I’d better start writing my own music, just staving off boredom. And eventually took that to university, and so I did my degree in ensemble and orchestra composition, very traditional, note based music, fed off the 20th century traditions at the time.

So it’s the late 20th century that I was at university, learning about Legeti, Xenakis, gosh, I have to go through all the names, Cage, Crumb, so many, Oliveros, just 20th century centralization of what classical music had become. Very interesting and liberating, and while very much away from rules, though still had a grounding in aesthetics, which is really important.  I got to spend some years at university studying something really special. That is still with me. Then while I was at university, I got introduced to computers. I hadn’t really spent much time with them before. And immediately I was like, Oh yes, I like this very much. So it became my second passion, computer programming, network programming.  At the time we were all using the same studio to write music. So everyone in my cohort, we had one computer shared between all of us. Some of the lucky people had computers at home, but most of us did not, especially not with Pro Tools and with all the hardware you needed at the time. And everything was that machine, you needed a soundboard and you needed an hardware reverb if you wanted it to sound any good and a room full of equipment, and I just loved it.

I really threw myself into learning how this worked and writing. What was electro acoustic music, which is a similar track from classical music, but instead using computers to write what we could still consider on the sort of classical or modern classical tradition, which is thinking about form and shape and narrative telling stories with sound. And so, I got exposed to all the software, just was very attracted to what was going on in the computer and how it all worked. And I was lucky enough to have some people around me who noticed the questions I was asking and gave me some introduction to computer programming and to hardware development and to how all these things worked. We also had a very good technical grounding at the university. I also had a base in physics, so I understood how computers work, how electricity works, all these important things that help you understand music, how music and electricity come together and make this incredible thing called electronics.

I started programming music software and then started programming software for the internet. And just being again with that tradition, as I said before, of feeling my way, there’s been no rules. It was a time in the nineties when I didn’t need much money to live and it was really fun being, well not fun, but it was totally okay being poor, living in house with big house with lots of other people, just making ends meet, but so much full of art and music. A lot of these people are still my very good friends and many have gone on to live similar lives of moving this sort of creative practice into their careers as well and still be amazing people. So through that I entered by mistake into, I guess, into the commercial world of software, because at some point I found myself working for Saatchi & Saatchi doing websites because it was very good money.

So then instead of having to be a dishwasher, which was perfectly fine by me, now I’m doing JavaScript for the National Ballet or something and earning five times as more. And so now only having to work half a day a week instead of three. So I’ve always loved that freedom of maximizing your time and having plenty of opportunity for creative practice. I just had years and years of being able to build creative projects, being able to travel the world. One of the other great things about computer programming around the year 2000 was that there was a real demand for anybody who knew how to build websites or program backend systems. So it’s pretty much able to pick up into the sort of travel and get work wherever I went and found myself in Amsterdam.

Where, again, these two worlds collided of technology and music. I got so lucky. I got invited to be artistic director—co-director, importantly, I had an incredible co director, Daniel—and of this Institute called Studio for Electronic and Instrumental Music, STEIM. Could you not put me in a better place in the whole world? I just got really lucky. And so I spent a couple of years there and there it was artists who were coming and needing support and technical support, how to build instruments for their own creative practice. So just an incredible exposure to world class artists and musicians and a very special time. And then when that came to time for me to start heading back to New Zealand, which in retrospect, I’m wondering why, as Europe seems to have held a special place to me. I was in Chicago of all places and met with my current co founder, Robert Marshall. We were having a beer one evening, we also bonded about music technology, having a single similar background. And he says to me, “this whole internet thing, I think we could do real time music streaming and use it for professional music post production”, which I didn’t really know much about that world at the time, how post production studios worked. But I was thinking, yes, I know how the internet works. I know how to program computers. I know what TCP/IP is. Sure. Let’s do it. And so ended up throwing both of ourselves into this world where we knew enough about the domain. But it didn’t really exist at the time. This is before Skype, Zoom didn’t exist. There was no Webex or any of those systems. They just didn’t exist. There were a few early ones like C-U-C-Me or some very early things, but they weren’t anything you’d think about using for professional life. Well, there were some other very expensive or professional services that needed hardware. And again, that wasn’t accessible enough to what we wanted to do. So we’re really on the cutting edge in just feeling our way in, learning, but when you’re younger, you’ve got 24 hours a day to learn. So the brain absorbs all of that. And yeah, within a couple of years, we found ourselves with this company, Source Elements, and how privileged am I to have spent the last two decades working with music and technology and all these amazing people who use our software and I get to spend my time with. We help them, which makes me very happy. That’s something that, me as a human being, I need. I need to feel that I’m being helpful on this planet. That satisfies a part of who I am. But also, a lot of the software we’ve been able to apply to assisted projects as well. And that’s also been very satisfying.

Then I went back to do Masters at the University, the same one I graduated in 20 years ago. And I thought, why not find out what happens when you use the software that I’ve been working with for commercial music and music production for classical music? Where does this fit in with this life that I love, with this musical experience that was so much a part of my life before I became absorbed by business and it opened my world again.  It was like another blooming of creativity happened where I found there were these people scattered across the world, like Chris Chafe and Sarah Weaver, and looking at how do you use these this internet technology to think about doing distance music together, about creating music from long distance, that became really important to me as well.  And I was really proud of the thesis that I wrote and started doing a lot of lecturing and sharing these ideas. And it’s just was very beautiful thing till the pandemic happened when that forced me back into business. A lot more. But I still found some time for teaching, which was really valuable. So the last few years since the pandemic have been taking everything that I ever learned and everything that Robert ever learned and everything that our team ever learned about remote collaboration for audio and video and thinking about what does the future need?  What does the future need so that people can live where they want, how they want, travel, not travel, work with their friends who aren’t there, find new friends who aren’t there, all of these questions that we have. So that’s where we arrive today and my part of this, and that is a very personal story for me.  Also because I’m now in Europe, 12 hours away from New Zealand in time zone, and I know what it’s like to communicate with my family, my friends, and how to maintain those relationships so they’re still fresh. But yeah, that’s probably a good place to stop. I hope that covers a good part of your questions.

Holly: This is great. And I know you’re saying that you don’t get much time to talk about yourself in this depth, but I actually think it was great because it helped me see how synergistic, how aligned your journey has been to where you’re at now. There’s so many things that I can tie into it. And one theme that I have.  For today is talking about collaboration and how that has changed within the music industry. And I can see that throughout your journey, there’s been different opportunities for you to learn different ways of collaborating, right? Or different needs have arisen for collaboration. Like when we talk about traveling around the world remotely, that’s its own unique kind of situation where you’re trying to figure out how to get people to have the same quality from where they’re at and be able to coordinate your projects. Or if you talk about pandemic where people are on the opposite spectrum, they’re shut in more, they’re maybe looking for that human connection that comes with collaboration and with having these tools rather than just relying on themselves. I know that one area I’ve struggled with. Within my own career was when everybody started going in the box with the DAWs and I think part of that made it really hard for me to shadow people and to get mentored because you used to have everybody in a studio collaborating together and you would learn in the recording studio and you would see the outboard equipment and you would see how they move the levers and learn that way and now it’s, what are you going to ask somebody? Can I look over your shoulder as you’re editing in the DAW? It gets It’s a lot harder to get those moments of collaboration, I think, where you’re able to learn. That’s where technology, like what you offer at Source Elements, like what Pro Tools is offering with some of their collaboration tools from a composing standpoint. These things are just so important for the different scenarios that we’re put into. So I think it’s really great to see how your journey, I mean, even when we talk about like orchestral music. When we talk about that, we’re talking about multiple instruments coming together in collaboration and being able to consider the frequencies and the timbres and the, how does this whole thing get composed into a really beautiful piece? It all comes back to collaboration, at least by what I see from that theme. I’d love to also talk a little bit about before I come back to the collaboration theme, cause we’ll come back to it a couple of times, I think, throughout this video. Podcasts, what do you think has changed as far as in the industry, that creative freedom that we were experiencing? I always go back to the days of the Beatles when they’re experimented music sense. And then being in this, what I would call the age of formulaic algorithms where everybody’s kind of spitting out very homogeneous stuff, but using the same effects because they’re just. We’re trying to gain something that’s going on. And I would just love to hear if you’ve experienced that shift, do you think people are going to come back to more of that creative freedom? Do you think that maybe they’re experiencing it more than I realize? Because my experience has always been that it’s made that shift to be more formulated, but maybe you have a different perspective on that.

Rebekah: If you’re looking at popular music, of course it’s formulaic, but that’s by definition. Popular music is something that can be understood by people who don’t have exposure to a wider range of creative practices. Popular music thrives on formulaic, but where you see creativity is on the edges. Soundcloud is an extraordinary resource. If you hit play on a random track in SoundCloud, you could go days and days. It’ll just keep playing you music that it finds that it thinks you might like. Incredible music. Very experimental. Some of it very good. Some of it not so good. And then you’ve got platforms like BandLab where you have people from teenagers to in their 60s or 70s, collaborating with tracks and writing music together. A lot of it that never gets heard by anybody, just gets shared within their own groups. And I’ve heard some really interesting music made in those conditions where people are just sharing. They’re not needing to be on Spotify and have their music listened to by millions of people that are saying, Hey, I made this. I want my friends and family to listen to it. I’m hearing some great stuff from that and people are satisfied with that. Maybe there’s a kind of thinking about chamber music when people back in the 17th and 18th, 19th centuries would play music for themselves, for the people that were in the room with themselves and they would compose and improvise. And it might be that the internet made it look like, Oh, I can be famous. And they say, therefore I have to try and be, which is a real trap for many artists. But those who have a sense of themselves are like not falling for that. And they’re saying, no, I have a community. I’m going to write music for my community. I’m going to make music videos or do whatever I do with my art and I’m not seeking the wider audience. And so certainly you do have, I believe, platforms on the internet, Spotify and YouTube where there’s algorithms that those algorithms are going to show you what’s popular because they just want more clicks. They just want more eyeballs. And what is popular is what gets looked at the most. But then you have crazy places like Reddit, where if you know how to use Reddit, And you go, you make an account and then you just kill everything off that it wants to show you. And you start from scratch with some of the really cool hidden places on Reddit. You can see incredible content. There’s some amazing artists out there and incredible advice as well. It might feel that the commercialization of the internet has made music or creativity less. Experimental, but I think it’s just, it feels like it’s not there because we’ve just got this big flashing neon sign in front of us. It says top 100 on YouTube or whatever. And so we forget to go looking. 

Holly: That’s really good insight. I think it does matter what platforms that you’re looking at. We get lost in, like you said, the YouTube search. Spotify, TikTok, world of it all. And there really are some great platforms out there. Like you said, Reddit, BandLab, some of these, even Patreon. In this world where we talk about super fans have been like this big term that’s being thrown around as of late. And what we’re really talking about are people that really love your music and aren’t just like passive listening on Spotify and they’re actually going to your. Concerts. They’re actually buying your merch. They’re actually along for the ride. The story of the artist. And there’s been a lot of talk about how it’s been harder with so much music. What a great thing to have that everybody can be on this platform. We’re not just stuck to what’s been promoted on the traditional radio. But at the same time, there’s almost So much music. It makes it hard for people to build that fandom. But I think that there’s a market for everything. I would rather have 20 really great fans that are standing by me. Then a gazillion likes that are just passive and nobody’s buying into it is like you said, there are places to build community. I think it’s just finding the right platform, depending on your goals as an artist. Some people may be all about, like you said, that reach and monetization and all these things, but. Things and other people just really want to make great music. And they want to find the people that are going to enjoy that music. Even if it’s a small collective, it’s about kind of separating out those two sides to things. And hopefully if you make great music, word of mouth goes around and you find other pathways to growing or expanding your audience, if that is something that you have in mind, it’s great that you see it that way, that the creative freedom isn’t lost. It’s just that we’re maybe. Forgetting to search other places to find it. And that really does go back to who we collaborate with. If we think about finding the right people and in a world where writers and composers, where there can be several on any one given album, several on any one given track and making sure that you’re getting the right melding of sounds, expertise, and authenticity from those artists to really make a great record or great deliverable, especially on the writing side, we have a lot more people. Working generally than you might on the artist’s side when it comes to collaboration. So I think that tools for that become really important as well. And with that in mind, like I’d love to talk a little bit about source elements and about some of your products and how that’s facilitating collaborating on any of these levels. 

Rebekah: A lot of the use of our platform has been to date professional music production and post production. And in terms of creativity, that’s always been driven by say, a director or a producer, a sound designer. They’re using the tool in addition to all of the other tools they have. It’s not something that’s designed to drive creativity specifically in itself. It’s not like a new kind of paint that allows people to invent new. Types of visual representation or something. So it’s been, it’s a tool in the tech toolbox. However, what was clear after I went back and did more academic study on how these tools could be used, that’s seeing a new world that is just starting to emerge, but still very much underground in some way of using the tool as part of the creative process. And that’s a really interesting topic for me, especially as being a musician and composer. And so that comes from thinking, what is the potential of being able to send High quality music and video from one place to another over long distances at a low enough latency that we can respond to what’s happening within human response times. So what does that allow us? What does it afford us to do? And so you have certain characteristics of music. For example, you have harmony, you have rhythm, you have timbre, so the quality of the sound. And those are characteristics of music that you can’t take out. Those are the core characteristics of music. And then you have characteristics of the internet. There’s latency. It takes time to transcode or transform or encode music and video into a format that it can be transmitted. There’s a latency to do that, and you can’t avoid it. You can’t just say to the computer, Hey, send this for me instantly. No, the computer has to turn it into its little bites, and that takes a while to do. There’s some systems are faster than others. For example, Elk audio’s got some great hardware. You’ve got these options to do it. Very low latency, but there’s still latency because even. Once you get over like 100 kilometers or 50 miles or whatever the equivalent is, the internet just takes a while to latency of light. I think it’s eight minutes to get from the sun to the earth. Imagine even the earth is not that big, but it’s still big enough that if you’re trying to send data at the speed of light from one side to the other, it’s still going to take. 100, 200 milliseconds because we’re sending at the speed of light. There’s these latencies that are core characteristics and you have this characteristic of the internet when you’re working in real time. When I say something, you hear it after I’ve said it or after I’ve played the note on a music instrument and then you cannot respond at the same time as what you’re used to when we’re in the same room together. And to be clear, when we’re in the same room together, There’s also latency, because there’s latency, it takes time for sound to travel through the air. Sound travels about 300 meters per second in the air. But our bodies have evolved for this latency, and our ears, and our brains, and our neuro processing has evolved for this latency, so we do not experience it as latency.

When you’re sitting with me in the same room, and playing a piano, and I’m playing the violin, and I say, one, two, three, go, it feels as if we’re playing at the same time. Because of our evolution. And along comes the internet, like not long ago, fiber internet in the last 10 years, cable in the last 20, dial up in the last 30, 40. We’re talking like tiny amounts of time in terms of human evolution. And we’re saying, hey, why don’t we add another two, 300 milliseconds of latency and see if we can play music. What? I can’t do that. Because we’re just not evolved for this. We’re not. Evolve to play with latency, right? So what do we do? We can’t change our evolution. It’s something that we need like Musk’s neural link or something to tell our brains to adjust to the latency. We change the music. We say, let’s think of music differently. We’re not going to adapt to playing music together. Over the internet, however, we are very clever as humans. We have massive brains that adapt quickly. So while our physical biology is not going to adapt, like I can’t tell my ear to imagine that, Hey, what you’re listening to just compensate for the latency. Like we do when we’re in the same room with each other. There’s too much latency for me to adapt to. I can say, let’s think about music in a different way. And when it comes in late, I’m going to be. Conscious of that, and I’m going to respond differently, knowing that you’re going to hear what I play back as late. So you end up having this different type of discourse of musical discourse. And just to be clear, I think that in the future, like we may be a hundred million years from now, we will adapt to. Having latency be something that our bodies understand, whether those bodies are going to be transhuman or man machine merging of some kind. We’re just talking about the short term human solution while we’re on this planet, because there’s another interesting problem that’s happening. It looks like within the next three, four hundred years, or maybe sooner, we’ll have people being on Mars. We’ll have people being on maybe the moon or asteroids, artificial space colonies. And I really believe that the work to be done right now. Is to make remote collaboration really important part of our culture, because once we start leaving the planet and once humans start populating different parts of the universe, if we don’t have a way to play music together, to make art together, to be together, spending time in real time, passing that time together, we’re going to evolve into different species. And maybe that’s not a bad thing, but I also think it’s something we could maybe try and avoid for the sake of universal peace. 

Holly: These are really abstract concepts, but think about where technology and science is at. We tend to think of time in our little world and how we understand time. But sometimes when we look historically at timelines, we take up such a small part of the overarching timeline, right? It’s interesting that you mentioned some of those things, because I don’t think that a lot of people in the audience have probably thought about here and where we’re at now, how are we serving to help with these things? 

Rebekah: Some of the early solutions are people are doing what they call asynchronous collaboration projects like band lab, for example. Well, you’ll have people who are not in the same physical location, whether it’s separated there on the other side of the neighborhood or in different cities or in different continents, and they’ll upload or create a track, and then they’ll tell the other person, have done this work. The other person will get a notification, and then someone else goes on next and then does something, lays another track or edits the track, and then the other person gets a notification. It is bouncing mixes between each other in non real time asynchronously. So it’s not playing together in the real time because playing together in real time has not really happened yet outside of experimental classical in jazz circles, which is where new forms of art usually happen anyways on the edges.  So I don’t think that we’re going to see mainstream real time user performance until we have technology being really sophisticated. You have to be a highly technical person to understand what’s happening with the network. Cause right now, most of these tools, including ours, they’re very technical. They’re requiring some kind of technical knowledge and know how. It’s a barrier to a lot of creative people. They’re not interested in spending their days reading software manuals and configurations. 

Holly: So how have you guys maybe helped to demystify or simplify the process for the user? 

Rebekah: Source-Connect has been on version three for a while. We have version four coming out very soon. And that is, I’m very proud, designed with exactly what I’ve been talking about. As much as possible to just be plug and play for the artist. For the talent, for the performer. And so our goal is that as a person whose job is not to understand how software works, like sound engineers usually tend to be quite technical, but they can install software and manage routers and routing, patching and stuff. That’s fine. But a performer, it’s not their primary interest in life. They want to go and stand in front of the microphone. And listen to some music or write some music together and focus on their body, focus on the output of their vocal chords. That’s what they’re interested in. And so I’m really proud that what’s coming is really helping that a lot. We’ve designed it to be as easy as possible, but it won’t be until it’s out until we find out how well we’ve done. 

Holly: Are you planning on having a beta kind of run through for different artists? I know you’ve run a beta in the  past.

Rebekah: Yes. And anyone who’s listening to this. Maybe you can put a link with the podcast, but you can go to https://source-elements.com/early-access. And that will put you on the list. And we look at that list all the time and we pick people off and say, Oh, I think you’d be a great person to come onto the beta and we’ll have a public beta soon as well, so anyone would be able to try it, but we’re getting there. Slowly getting this out to the world.  It’s been a very special development. Precision engineered. I feel like we’re going from Model T Ford days to a spaceship. This is what the difference of what it feels like now. So that’s really exciting. But there’s still challenges as musicians because this Product again was made for music production, for, for doing automatic dialogue recording, or for doing review and approval, hearing an orchestra play back to a video, to a cinema, so that the workflows aren’t towards a group of musicians sitting down with each other and, and making music. However, it does work if you’re a group of musicians wanting to do songwriting, you can do asynchronous sharing, you can play back to each other what you’re working on, you can have conversations of, you know, It’s another thing that technology needed was to make sure that audio quality and the video quality were good enough. Almost every communication platform, Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, they’re not made for quality. They’re not made for creating high quality work together. They’re made for a human conversation. And, What that means is that whenever you hear noise in the background, it’s going to merge with your voice. And they’re going to start doing some noise cancellations. They’re going to change the timbre of your voice that maybe you don’t hear that dog barking. They’re going to take away some reverb. It just sounds a little more nice to the human voice. They’re focusing on the human voice. So it sounds like I can hear what you’re saying when you’re having a conversation. But when I’m singing music, when I’m wanting to have a conversation. Good conversation or some kind of rap or hip hop or other forms where you want to hear all the inflections of the voice. You don’t want the sort of encoding to take away anything from the quality. You want that raw quality that’s going straight into the microphone. So that’s the difference that we have there is that we really focus on this musicianship experience. 

Holly: That’s wonderful. The other question that I have, specifically, cause I work with a lot of smaller indie brands, indie companies, indie artists who may not have a large budget, would we say that the product offerings that Source Elements are arranged in a tier fashion where somebody who maybe isn’t coming from like a major production house or a major label would still be able to afford to use these products?

Rebekah: Oh, yes. So our new Source-Nexus platform, it’s 11. 95 a month, and you could just use that for one month and then cancel it. Can’t really get much more affordable, it’s two coffees, and only one person needs to have that license, so you can share that with multiple people being able to need to work together. So it’s certainly attacked the problem of affordability, I’m really excited about that. 

Holly: I love that as well as somebody who runs her own business and may not have tons of investors. I’m always looking for tools that are affordable for the community and my connections to utilize and to share and to partake in the great value that these tools are offering just real quick for people who, again, are newer and may not know of source elements. So you have a few different offerings, right? You have Nexus, you have Connect, and I think there’s a few more, right? Love to just hear some of the quick differentiators between those offerings. 

Rebekah: Ironically, if you go to our website right now, it’s source elements.com, and you’ll see in our products list, we’ve got the main ones, Source-Connect and Source-Nexus. And then we have some smaller utilities. We’re actually on the process of having only two products. So we’re having a platform, we have Source-Connect and Source-Nexus. And within those two, there’s a place for all of the other utilities that we have. For example, there’s one called Source-Zip, which is about being able to transfer large files quickly. That belongs in both Source-Nexus and Source-Connect, so it’ll become a utility that will just come along with the subscription. That you have for either of those. You might have a subscription for Source-Connect or just Source-Nexus. I’ll explain the difference of those. And we also have another one, Source-LTC, which is a way of sending time code, which is a very important requirement for professional studios. That’s going embedded into Source-Connect because that’s when they need to use it. So you won’t need to buy. Source LTC anymore, it will be in Source-Connect 4. Another one is the remote timeline, which is a way of synchronizing videos without having a DAW. And again, that’s going into Source-Connect. We’re just sort of merging all of these technologies into one, which is going to make it a lot more accessible and perhaps also show people what they can do with this sort of magnificent tool. That’s coming out with all of these opportunities. Not everyone’s going to use them all, but maybe they don’t use them because they don’t know they exist. So for example, with yourself being a podcast, you would use Source-Nexus and you can have people record it the same way we’re recording each other now. And then that’s just going to be delivered to you in the most high quality format. But at a very affordable price. Portable price, 11. 95 for you, but plus it comes with all the other things. So if there was storage that you can transfer your files between each other, you could do collaborative editing. You could do podcasts with videos, which right now is cumbersome. We can give you tools where you can have recorded HD video. We could also have tools in the future where we can have AI or machine learning, make an edit for you based on the audio, the same way that some of these other podcasts and tools are doing as well. So those are the direction that that’s going. And then with Source-Connect, so just to say Source-Nexus is really designed as a tool when the audio and video you need to capture is going to be distributed to a platform such as the internet, like podcasts or YouTube, or when you’re just needing to work on a project where there’s no capture involved. For example, Hi, have a look at this video that I’m making, give me some feedback. And you can experience that in really good quality. And you don’t say, I don’t know, it’s all pixelated. I don’t know what I’m looking at, or it’s dropping frames like all the commercial tools do. So that’s what that’s designed for. So Source-Nexus is about when you need to be together in real time, but the end result is not needing to be a super high quality capture. When it’s, so the Source-Connect is the opposite. It’s when you need to be together in real time, and the result has to be a high professional quality. File for cinema or television broadcast. It needs to be synced. It may work with Dolby Atmos. It needs to be multi channel tracking. Maybe you need to have it like sample accurate. So you can be doing tracking of different instruments at the same time. And you need to make sure that sync is correct. So there’s the sort of two areas of working together that we’ve identified. One is when you’re just working together and you’re either capturing files like this one, for example, if it goes out of sync of it, nobody’s going to care because it’s just a conversation, but these other types of capture, like for the synchronization of an orchestra for a June trailer, and it has to be like totally on the frame when that drum hits, when that, that timpani goes, boom, you need to see that frame of the video going black and the explosion at the same time. You can’t afford to be out of sync. That’s what Source-Connect is for. 

Holly: Thank you for such great explanations of the products. I really appreciate that. I think it was depicted very well. Some of the use cases for either. And I think that also helps guide our audience as to which they might need or which they want to test out or what they work together.

Rebekah: We’ve got your orchestra. You can have a 90 piece orchestra. In Budapest or Vienna or Los Angeles or England, London, where were these orchestras working? And the director could be in New Zealand or the Los Angeles orchestras working with the directors in Romania because they’re busy with another film. And so they’re playing back that film sound together and the directors in a studio where they’re going to get really good sync, but the directors like also wants their producer on there. Then maybe they want their editor on there. But those people don’t need to be experiencing the perfect high quality with all of the Atmos tracks, with all of the high end stuff that ends up needing to go when you’re shipping a product for IMAX, the producer and whoever else is sort of a collaborator or a stakeholder, they could be on their iPad at home listening on stereo headphones. Source-Nexus is that side of it. So the director will be in a studio with Source-Connect and with the high end video sync. But then at the same time, the orchestra is able to make sure that the producer and the other stakeholders are going to be able to experience the same session from the conditions that they need.

Holly: It really helps with workflow management. We’re always trying to find these all in one tools because there’s so many tools out there. A lot of people would prefer things to work more seamlessly together. And I think we’re always looking for that in the industry. So I think this is a really great offering. I’d love to leave the audience with just a few words from you on if there’s any takeaways that you can impart as far as staying collaborative, being able to utilize These new tools to be collaborative, just anything you’d like to end with. 

Rebekah: We work with some of the most professional systems in the world. Extraordinary people in institutions, orchestras, directors, Hollywood, Bollywood, whatever they call it in England, London, in Australia, anywhere that film is being made, which is global now, the equipment they have and the amount of technical knowledge. That’s happening in a film studio. If you walk into the lot of like Disney or Warner Brothers, there’s so much technical knowledge, there’s electricians and there’s people who know where every sample is going and who’s looked at it and the security and this cyber security is another big one that’s also really important of ours, a consideration that we take seriously. This is the industry of media, of film and television. And it’s very technical and there’s people who’ve been doing their jobs either a long time or highly well trained. And so our product was made for them primarily. But another really interesting side of it is that artists, students, experimental people, choirs, ensembles, they can also use our tools. And we’ve got some really great examples of this. The same tools can be used to make New forms of art, new forms of creativity, working with pipe organs, for example, there’s a pipe organ in Vancouver, there’s a pipe organ in Amsterdam, there’s a pipe organ in Sweden, and there’s one in Germany. There’s four pipe organs. When was the last time you saw a pipe organ on a plane? Nobody picks up a pipe organ and takes it with them. So what do you do? But you want them to collaborate and to play music together. You use our software. And so we work with this group called the HyperOrgan. And they, once a year, they get connected up and they can send information, not just sound, but also MIDI or Open Sound Control data. And then they can actually play music together. And it’s extraordinary to be able to hear And super high good quality, the sound of another organ with your organ, because they’re different. The room is different. The quality of the room you’re listening to, it’s got a certain echo, has certain reverb, has certain architectural timbres. And so you can take an organ from Vancouver and then put it into your room and listen to it from there. This is very exciting. I love supporting this project. Another one I did was working with the Red Cross with two choirs, one in Athens in Greece and one in Gothenburg in Sweden and so the choirs were made up of people who had been seeking or had obtained refugee status and the majority were not able to travel anymore. They traveled enough, they had come from very complicated places and all had intense Powerful stories of how they got to Athens and how they got to Sweden, walking in long journeys. And then they find themselves in this beautiful choir as a way to, to join their communities and through song to, to blossom as people. So there’s, since then couldn’t travel anymore because of the refugee status, we were like, let’s have these two choirs sing together. And they really bonded in a way that touched every single one of us on this project. There were hundreds of us there. And each of us were like, this is just insanely amazing to see these two choirs gotten to know each other.

I’d given my technical services so that we could make this happen. And just hearing two choirs singing together from different parts of the world, sharing their stories, often. It’s the same stories because they had similar backgrounds or there was one, for example, a woman who said, I hear someone in Greece singing a song that I used to hear when I was growing up. Come on, just powerful stuff. Life changing for us all. So these things are happening. There’s more. I’ve got so many more stories. A friend of mine who can’t travel because of health reasons. And so he still gets to be a musician and play concerts with his friends, can stay at home and can make sure that he’s got all the technology he needs to stay connected. This is important stuff. Really important stuff. Yeah. 

Holly: These are great stories, and I remember that from when we initially chatted several years back, that the stories behind what you’re offering are truly, to me, this is what showcases the value of what you’re doing and what you’re offering. And I think it comes back to what you were saying about human connection, and I mean, music is, it is part of us, but allowing for the same Type of collaboration is allowing for greater human connection, greater music connection. It’s just such a great offering. I do invite my audience to check out Source Elements, give it a test drive for the products that Rebekah’s offering here. And I think we’d love to hear what everybody thinks. We will have to hear the stories. I think more than anything, don’t want to speak on your half, Rebekah, but I would say that that’s probably the most rewarding part of this is hearing the stories that come out of the use of the product. I thank everybody for being here today. Thank you, Rebekah, for your time. This was a lovely session and thank you for being here. 

Rebekah: Well, thank you so much, Holly. It was really great to have an opportunity to talk, cause I mentioned I don’t usually get to do that. I’m too busy organizing this whole software to come out as quickly as possible so everyone can enjoy it. And it’s great to have some background here about why we are working so hard. Thank you.
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