Brain Music made with Neuroscience — John Vitale

Deep Future

Music producer & sound engineer John Vitale is creating music to help people optimize brain states. After co- founding Focus@Will, where he designed music and soundscape channels for flow state he moved on to found Brain Music Labs Where he’s crafting new ways to use entrainment based music and media for reducing stress, anxiety, and cravings with partners like Total Brain and Felix.

John is a great guy and I’m thrilled to be able to share this conversation about the importance and potential for audio as a technology frontier. Also, John created the intro you hear at the beginning of every Deep Future podcast and I’m super grateful to him for taking that on.

Pablos: I’ve been playing with this 3D spatial audio lounge online.

John: Which one?

High Fidelity.

John: I know Philip. I’m trying to think of the best use case for that and I was trying to get them out. In fact, Philip presented at Metal.

Pablos: I didn't go to that one. I heard him calling for them. I’ve been playing with High Fidelity a bunch.

John: I'd love to get your take on, where do you see as a great use case for High Fidelity?

Pablos: Where Philip is coming from is about trying to develop these tools to improve virtual reality experiences with a vision towards something like second life, but in VR, where you can just walk around and hang out with people. The audio substrate is a big deal. That's a big part of it. I'm not telling you the things you know. The neurological cues around audio are a big deal. The way I think about it for all of human history, all of our conversations were zero-latency until the last century, face-to-face. One hundred percent spatially positioned.

The sound was coming from where the speaker was sitting every time. That is not true on phones, on Zoom and on anything that's mediated online. High Fidelity tries to use that to make you feel like the connection is more real. They're busy trying to go further with this and develop it for VR. It's going to be exciting to see where they get to. With the High Fidelity tool, as we know it now, we can wander around on a map and chat with people.

It's super compelling in ways. I've made friends in there, which I can't say I've ever done on Zoom. It feels like hanging out. If you go to High Fidelity with headphones on and you close your eyes, and you're there with a half dozen people, it's like we're at a dinner table. They're all spatially positioned in the same spot. When they speak, you can hear them as if they were there. It's a special experience I much prefer to Zoom.

John: I like your dinner table view. You should have a dinner table there because they have different maps. What I liked is you could go there and go, “We're going to all go see the DJ event.” You can go walk 100 feet from DJ like you're at Burning Man and go, “That's cool, but let's go talk in the corner.” You and your friends go over there. That's the magic of what’s going on.

Pablos: That is one of the experiences that I love about it. In my view, there are a lot of places you could go with it and there's a bunch of potentials. One