March 19, 2024 • 37 mins
In this episode of The Bom: Engineering a Path Forward, we’re talking about the process of turning engineering components into musical instruments and how that has the potential to change many aspects of our culture. At least, that’s what my guest today, Kirk Pearson, founder of Dogbotic, believes. Dogbotic is a music and sound research collective that is redefining what music is and is working to make musical and electrical engineering education more accessible.
The views and opinions expressed within this content are solely the speaker's and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of Supplyframe or its affiliates.
The views and opinions expressed within this content are solely the speaker's and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of Supplyframe or its affiliates.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
I can remember several like goofy comediesthat like display like an archetype of an
electronic music person, and it's alwayslike this weird little dweeb who's anti social
versus you know, like the powerrock guitarists or something like that, which
are you know, cool and hipand sexy. And I think that's so
interesting. That was a really serious, like cultural perspective that a lot of
(00:21):
people had for a long time,and nowadays, you know, that's that's
more or less gone. In thisepisode of The Bomb Engineering a Path Forward,
we're talking about the process of turningengineering components into musical instruments and how
that has the potential to change manyaspects of our culture. At least that's
what my guest today, Kirk Pearson, founder of dog Botic Beliefs. Dog
(00:43):
Bodic is a music and sound researchcollective that's redefining what music is and is
working to make musical and electronics engineeringeducation more accessible today. Kirk walks us
through a brief history of the crossoverbetween engineers and musicians, how AI generated
music could deaden the more interesting aspectsof music culture, and why no matter
where you go, there's probably alovable eccentric in a garage building a strange
(01:06):
musical instrument out of spare parts.This is my conversation with Kirk Pearson and
this is the Bomb. We livein a time where design and technology touch
every aspect of our lives. Butwhere did it all come from? Who
designed it? How is it builtand brought to market? What will look
(01:26):
like in a year, two years, one hundred years. From the phones
and smartwatches that help us in ourday to day to the cutting edge spaceships
and three D printers that are leadingus into the future. Modern design is
constantly shaping the way we work,communicate, problem solve, and play.
And every new design, big orsmall, starts with an idea and a
bill of materials. I'm agenta strongheart, and this is the Bomb where we
(01:48):
talk to leading innovators in the techworld and celebrate the transformational power of design.
What thank you so much for joiningus today on the Bomb. I'm
so excited to learn all about Dogboticand sort of your story. How you
got to starting this awesome studio.Oh, thank you so much for having
(02:09):
me so My understanding is that youall are part music production studio. You
make original compositions and produce things forall different kinds of clients. You're also
a research lab, which I'm reallyinterested to hear a little bit more about
what that means in this space.And then, last, but of course
(02:30):
not least, you guys offer educationalworkshops for kind of all things music and
sound making and production and hardware andtechnology that goes into that. You make
some awesome kits. I love thegraphics and branding of everything. By the
way, on your side, it'sreally thank you a joy to kind of
look through. So tell us alittle bit more about how this all comes
(02:51):
together and what each part, youknow, kind of works on. Yeah,
well, it's a very hard companyto pitch people because it doesn't make
a lot of sense. But effectively, Dogbotic is a collective of musicians,
composers, sound designers, and creativeengineering types and we do all sorts of
projects together. So I'm a composermyself, and I started Dogbotic as really
(03:14):
an outlet for me to be ableto, you know, spell my music
for money. So I started out, you know, doing composition for film
and TV and sound design and stufflike that, and then it kind of
expanded into all sorts of other weirdthings. Sometimes people you know, needed
a very specific musical instrument engineered andI could build it, or you know,
sometimes people would need me to researcha very specific array of speakers for
(03:38):
a particular special effect or something,and so it kind of grew from a
purely creative studio into like a researchproject as well. And then over the
pandemic, in the first few monthsof the pandemic, all of that live
work just kind of dried up immediately, as it did for so many people,
and it took us a couple monthsbefore we realized, hey, we
(03:59):
know how to do a whole lotof this stuff, and everyone seems to
be at home now. So wecame up with the idea of teaching a
one off build your own synthesizer workshopwhere I would literally send you a big,
creative, whimsically designed materials and we'dspend two months together building it out,
you know, into a working synthesizer. And much to my delight,
that ended up kind of catching on, and we're still doing that four years
(04:23):
later. Some of the titles ofthe workshops are super fun, and I
love that you explained a little bitacross the range of what you all offer,
because there's I mean, so manydirections we could dive deeper into from
there, but we won't get toocarried away. But it's also interesting to
just hear how it's grown really organically, you know, from primarily this synth
(04:44):
workshop that could be you know alittle more straightforward to all these different kind
of curiosities that people have within thisworld. And I love that. I
think a lot of projects like thiswe try to do kind of some similar
stuff at Design Lab, where itcan be a really great foot in the
door to bigger engineering concepts and topicsand things that might be a little intimidating
(05:06):
or overwhelming. But having this kindof fun entry point with something familiar like
a walkman or a synth or youknow, any number of things can really
help people jump off into the deepend later of all things engineering and design
and production. I totally agree.I think that I say so much to
(05:28):
the point where it's kind of cliche. Is the great thing about building synthesizers
is you're not like building elevator brakingsystems. You know, in that when
you're building an elevator braking system,it better work the same way every time.
With a synthesizer, we're making wavesof sound that are culturally interesting totally.
I love that you brought up kindof the empowerment of building something hands
(05:50):
on yourself, because I think that'shuge and something I'm a big kind of
advocate for as well. Why Igot into building and making and I think
a lot of people because there's justsomething so satisfying about building something that you
know you might have used before oryou were thinking of and maybe it doesn't
exist yet, and you put itinto the world, you know, physically
(06:12):
by making it yourself. And I'msure you've had some amazing gotten to witness
a ton of kind of aha momentsaround that with your students, Oh for
sure. Yeah. Do you likeever get the I mean, I think
we're like roughly the same age,and I feel like, I don't know,
after so many years of building thingson a computer where absolutely everything is
(06:33):
tweakable and touchable, you realize thatnothing is tactile and it's you know,
you really want to you know,it's wonderful to be able to actually touch
something physically and move it around.So there's like an element of like unblack
boxing that I think comes for alot of people. And like even the
walkman thing, it's kind of crazy. We get a whole bunch of like
kids that have for for sure neverused a walkman before who take the workshop
(06:56):
and you know, get a lotout of it. So that makes me
really happy. So as I waskind of online stocking your background, I
was really interested to hear that yougot this opportunity to do through the Thomas
Watson Fellowship. You wrote in yourbio that you went all over the world
getting to work on compositions with experimentalinstruments, and I'd love to hear what
(07:17):
were some of these experimental instruments,What does that look like, what does
that mean? Were you building themon the spot, did you take the
same instrument around the world. Wheredid you get to go and what were
some of your highlights of that experience. The Watson Fellowship was a weird,
like you know, windfall for me, I got very lucky and I got
selected to do this project. It'sa really bizarre fellowship and that they awarded
(07:43):
to I think forty people a year. And the idea is you have to
leave the United States for one calendaryear and not come back and you can
research, you know, like youapply with a proposal, and my proposal
was experimental musical instruments. So mythought process behind this was I went to
you know, I went to musicschool where I learned to you know,
(08:05):
compose for the standard set of instruments. And the thing that I thought was
so interesting is that, you know, as far as the standard set of
instruments goes, the most recent onethat was, you know, has been
added to the canon is the tuba, which was added to orchestras in nineteen
oh eight ish or something like thatwas when it really became adopted. So
that's pretty old. It's before youhave an electric grid nearly at the scale
(08:28):
of you know, our grid today. It's before the sounds of electronics.
You know, even really people didn'tencounter sounds that were very loud too frequently
in the way that we think aboutit now. So the world, the
world sounds totally different. And ifyou were to take a person from nineteen
oh eight and drop them here rightnow, just think about how alien absolutely
everything would sound to them, evenlike my accent and volume of voice or
(08:52):
whatever. So I thought it wouldbe interesting to try to rebuild an orchestra
with a whole bunch of musical instrumentsthat were can temporary that catered in some
way to you know, the twentyfirst century ear end brain. And so
I did the Watson totally wrong.You're supposed to do something like go to
five different countries or something, andI went to twenty two because I have
(09:13):
the attention span of a goldfish.But I mean, I'm at some truly
incredible people. Really, in everysingle corner of the world, there is
some lovable eccentric in a garage whois building a strange musical instrument, and
so much of the community building overthe course of the Watson was you know,
you meet one guy in Costa Ricawho says, hey, you've got
(09:35):
to meet this guy in Peru,and then you go to Peru and he
says, hey, you've got togo check out this guy over here,
and so, you know, sothat's kind of how it happens. It's
a it's such a weird, nichehobby, but you know, it's it's
it's strange how people are motivated by, you know, kind of kind of
similar things in the Quest for Soundsthat nobody's heard before. So so many
(09:56):
follow up questions. First, Iwant to re wine a little bit to
you saying that technically the newest instrumentto or the latest instrument was the tuba.
That just like blew my mind fora moment in the orchestra. Yeah,
in the orchestra, right, whodetermines that that that was the last
(10:16):
the latest instrument to enter the orchestraofficially and that sort of thing. I'm
curious what the governing body as faras that goes, is great, So
yeah, the official orchestra governing buttNo, So yeah, there's no there's
no governing body or anything like that. Music history is kind of strange.
The tuba was actually, interestingly enough, adopted really widely for recording reasons.
(10:41):
If you've seen like those you know, early Edison recording devices, which is
what we were working on prior tolike nineteen eleven or something like that,
you know there it's like you're engravinginto aluminum or wax or something, and
in order to move that stylist upor down right, you really got to
like shout into a tube. Soaround that era, when you know,
(11:01):
when physical recorded media became a thing, certain sounds like you know, a
plucked bass sound just didn't really pickup very well. Sounds like deep brass,
which are rich and resonant. Thosepick up really well in wax.
So you'll notice if you look ata whole bunch of pieces of music,
like a lot of jazz standards fromthe nineteen tens and stuff like that,
it's all tuba parts, no stringbased parts, and all the string bassists
(11:24):
last a job for a couple ofyears until recording technology improved. So yeah,
so there are a lot of weirdtechnological reasons that the tuba was favored,
but it was. It was.It started to be incorporated into our
chestral music around ye around first decadeof the twentieth century, and then eventually,
like it kind of just became codifiedbecause it appeared in enough arrangements.
(11:46):
We have to take a quick break. But when we come back, Kirk
tells us how a community of buildersand makers can lead an engineer to places
they never would have imagined. Welcomeback to the bomb Engineering A Path Forward.
(12:09):
I'm your host, Magenta Strongheart.When we left off, Kirk was
spinning their tail globe trotting for experimentalsounds. And no matter where you go,
it seems people will always turn nonmusical items into instruments. Okay,
So the other part of what you'resaying is that you went to twenty two
different countries in a year, andyou mentioned that, you know, it's
(12:31):
kind of happening organically. It soundslike you would go to one place and
then they introduce you you need tocheck out so and so here and that
sort of thing. And so howdid this kind of all culminate? What
were that I hate to be youknow, like, what were the results?
It's not about that clearly was anincredible, you know experience as well,
But what did this kind of turninto for you? And maybe even
(12:52):
regardless of what was required of thefellowship process, besides meeting so many amazing
people all over it sounds like whatdid you create from this? Right?
Well, the deliverable was weirdly small. The only deliverable that the Watson Foundation
mandates you do is you go toa conference and you give a ten minute
presentation on what you did for thelast year. So I did that passed
(13:13):
with flying colors. That was fine. But yeah, I mean I made
a lot of art throughout the year. I'm met a lot of really amazing
people and like a lot of themtoo, are like people that I you
know, I still regularly work with, which is kind of fun in the
you know, in my like inmy you know, commercial work. Every
once in a while, I youknow, I'm hired for a project that
needs something really really specific sounding,and you know, I have a whole
(13:37):
roll ofdex of people now that Ican you know, hire to record any
any number of wonderful and strange sounds. But I guess the real like thing
to come out of the my fellowshipwas Dogbotic. Honestly, I think it
was really formative for me to seeso many different i don't know, like
archetypes of creative communities around the world, and to you know, note how
(14:01):
some of them worked well in certainregards and didn't work well in other regards.
You know that that's you know,I loved every individual I worked with,
but I meant more of like thepolitics of you know, how how
one creates and how one exists asan artist in the you know, twenty
twenties, and so that that wasreally what came out of it. So,
you know, I started dog Botic, you know, kind of as
(14:24):
you know, as a means tobe doing the work that interests me,
which is, you know, searchingfor unexpected sound sources, making instruments and
composing with them, and uh yeah, all of this kind of grew out
of that. It's it's a it'sa fun, weird space to occupy,
but but I'm very happy with it. The instruments and inventing community is uh
(14:46):
is really really warm and really friendly, and I'm very lucky to be a
part of it. I can imaginehow inspiring and and awesome that experience was,
and I feel like I definitely havekind of similar moments of you know,
inspiration, just going to new places, meeting people that are doing things
(15:07):
in a different way, and likeyou said, seeing different different kind of
prototypes or ways that people are organizingor structuring means to be creative and also
you know, kind of financially sustainableand stable in their practice, which I
think is a huge obviously huge focusand topic of conversation for artists everywhere in
(15:30):
almost every kind of discipline, rightis like how do you balance the creative
side of things and the money makingside of things? You know? I
think that that's something that's as Iwas learning more about Dogbotic, something I
felt was going to be very interestingto our audience as well. Is to
see kind of what you've developed andhow you've organized you know, that that
structure within your studio as well.So I think that's actually a great kind
(15:54):
of segue to you mentioned you nowhave this great role deck, and you
have clients that you work with oncommercial projects of course, and one that
really stuck out to me that Iselfishly want to talk about because I'm a
huge Rihanna fan and I was abig fan of the Savage Fentee Volume four
show. So when I saw thaton your portfolio, I was like,
(16:17):
wow, I got to ask themabout this experience. So I remember watching
that and thinking the animated portions wereso interesting and not what I expected having
seen the previous shows that she haddone for Savage fenty and so I'd love
to hear more about how this projectkind of came together, What were some
of the most interesting parts of workingon it, how much of it I
(16:41):
know in some of what I wasreading about it, you know, it
sounded very collaborative. It wasn't justdogbotic working on you know, some of
the parts. But it does soundlike you all really concepted and kind of
designed from the jump, you knowwhat it was going to look like and
sound like. So tell us more. Oh yeah, it was. It
was a blast to work on.So my buddy Nicole Stafford, who lives
(17:02):
up in Oregon, she's an animator, uh, and we've worked on a
we worked on a number of projectstogether. We did we did an animated
short of hers called The Hork,which went to sun Dance during the one
year that it was canceled. She'sshe's a blast to work with. She's
got a really you know, wonderful, kooky sense of humor and also just
really like amazing visual sense. Soshe she works with the studio called Odd
(17:29):
Fellows. It's based up in Portland. That's been one of my favorite clients
to work with over the last severalyears. They're an animation house that does
you know, both commercial and artisticwork, and you know, we we
see eye to eye on a lotof things creatively, and so we've been
fortunate enough to work with them alot. And uh, yeah, the
Savage Fenny Show was uh, Imean yeah. They hired Nicole to do
(17:52):
these beautiful, surreal animated segments thatkind of bridged the you know, the
the acts of the of the show. And Nicole wanted to do these.
Yeah, so there are five differentvignettes that you know, introduced the next
artist, and they're all done inthe style of various, I don't know,
(18:14):
strange animators from the seventies and eighties. There's one that looks like Ralph
Boschi and stuff like that. Sothe sound was pretty part Blanche. She
really let me do whatever I wantedwith it, which was a lovely,
lovely thing about working with her,and so I, yeah, I was
able to get pretty it was ableto get pretty weird with it. So
a lot of the sounds that wehear in the in the sound design for
(18:37):
those segments are there are sounds thatI record myself, like you know,
me throwing rocks into the ocean orwhatever. But also a whole bunch of
like little homemade synthesizers that are youknow, not dissimilar from the kind that
we teach you how to build intoworkshops. So I really, I really
like kind of composing that way,Like I can build a circuit in front
of me, just have a liveaudio you know, feed of that going
(19:00):
into a computer and mess around forforty five minutes that I can kind of
go through that and lean the partsthat I like out of it, and
then collage with those I love thatyou kind of use the analogies of recipe
and collage. I think that's reallyhelpful, just I can say, at
least for me, who I'm someoneyou know, who's not so much in
the musical audio composition world here andthere, but very infrequently so to think
(19:25):
of kind of the way you're puttingthese things together. I think it's really
helpful to think of, you know, other ways that people think of structuring
something like a composition, or howthey work on a work of art.
In a way, as we're talkinghere, I was curious if you could
tell us as you were describing somethingsense too. I thought about it,
(19:45):
and what's you know in the roombehind you a little bit about some of
your favorite tools and the things youuse to make the things you have to
make, which is one of ourfavorite topics here on the BOTMB. And
for me personally, yeah, Ilike the recipe analogy. I think because
when you think in terms of process, you realize that by slightly changing your
(20:06):
process, you will change the outcome. I feel like music school, especially
kind of put me in a weirdbind where it taught me to think about
writing music as a very specific process, you know, like you might build
a chair in one particular way inyour wedgstop or something like that. You
know, but maybe that's not aperfect analogy, because you know, a
chair is ultimately functional. Yeah,when you're making a piece of art,
(20:30):
changing your process is a really greatway of changing your perspective. I think
like a lot of like a lotof how I was taught to think about
music was you have an idea inyour head, you pluck it out on
the keyboard or something like that,and you notate it down, and that's
how that works. But you knowthat's not how you have to compose.
I think it's equally valid to recordforty five minutes and weird sounds and pluck
(20:52):
out the best bits and you know, put those in a sequence. You
know, that's still composition. Tome, I was going to say,
as you were talking trying to connectit to the chair idea, I can
connect it for sure to some ofthe I think sculpture process that some of
my colleagues and I have you know, went through through school as well,
where it's like some people like towork in the kind of I guess you
(21:17):
could say traditional like you're saying,just like mine to notes to product.
Essentially, they have a vision andthey carve it out of wood or stone
or whatever it might be. Butthere's also I think there's a very i
would say, kind of common processof more this collage or assembly kind of
way where you're working with a lotof different modular parts, like you like
(21:40):
to make a lot of you know, little plaster casts for example or something
like that, and then you doa lot of these drawings and you do
this and these things very intuitively,and then it's what you know you're able
to draw together between these things thatmake the ultimate piece. And it is
this kind of collage or like yousaid, recipe where the process is really
(22:02):
informing you know, what's interesting aboutwhat you're able to create in the end,
So totally totally picking up what you'reputting down. Yeah, it's it's
all. It's all happy accidents.There's a fun Wikipedia rabbit hole if anyone
is interested. There's there's an articlethat's a list of surrealist games. Games
(22:22):
that were played by you know,like salons of French people in the early
twentieth century, and they're all reallyweird. They're effectively recipes. There are
things like heat some wax in apot and then throw the molten wax into
some ice water and it'll freeze intoa shape and take that out and sketch
it. Stuff like that, youknow, like they're they're just strange processes
that you don't know what the endproduct is going to be, but you
(22:45):
know the end product is going tobe interesting somehow, and so you know,
I think those kinds of things arereally fun to teach, you know,
because you know, I just wantto encourage people to make something.
You know, not everything's going tobe great, that's fine, rapid prototype
a lot of things you'll have somegood on Totally, Totally, it all
comes down to the editing, right. It's what you choose not to integrate
into the end that's just as importantas what you do choose to put into
(23:08):
it. So yeah, I lovethat. I'm definitely gonna have to look
that up after this and learn moreabout some of those games. That sounds
super fun. They're fun, goodgood Saturday night. Yeah. Obviously like
your kind of educational background, butalso the different parts of what you're doing
in the studio all work together andinform one another. Which I think is
very common and relatable to folks thatmove between kind of different disciplines or different
(23:34):
aspects of their practice. And soI'd love to hear more about how you
would say each kind of part ofthe business or part of your work informs
the other. How you know,maybe working with some of your students ends
up into some of your commercial workor into some of the research work,
and vice versa. Well, it's, for sitting, all related in some
(23:57):
deep metaphysical sense. But yeah,in another regard, the halves of Dogbotic
are you know, they they domaintain a little bit of distance, but
the processes that we teach are notdissimilar from the processes that we use when
we're hired, you know, todo to do work. I think at
(24:17):
this point I described Dogbotic more aslike it's a collective of artists and our
job is to find excuses to giveartists money to do things, you know,
whether that's through doing you know,commercial works art works or teaching these
workshops you know, and you know, that's that's how that model really works.
So I think that's kind of ultimatelythe thing that they have in common.
But yeah, I mean, reallyin the end like the you know,
(24:41):
like the I think the ethical perspectivethat I have with the workshops about
you know, how it's you know, it's important to take stuff apart.
It's important to figure out how theworld works. It's important to you know,
remember that you know, you canyou can make new sounds that have
not been heard, and you knowthose sounds have cultural significance to them.
Those are absolutely part of the philosophyof everything that we make in the studio.
(25:04):
No, that makes a lot ofsense. And I love what you
said about it's an excuse really toto give money to artists to make more
things because this is important works thatis and you know we all need to
eat. Yes, yes, ofcourse, But and I also don't want
to bring it up as like justlike a buzzword kind of thing. But
I am curious to hear perspective onwhat's kind of new in AI when it
(25:26):
comes to music production and sound design. What do you think is like,
you know, most promising in thatregard, And what are you kind of
more worried about if you're willing toshare. I'm worried about it making culture
even more bland than it already is. That's my that's my fundamental concern.
(25:47):
I think a lot of my concernsabout AI are really concerns about either culture
or or capital. Is it reallylike, I'm worried about people, you
know, people losing their jobs.But then again, for you know,
huns of years, you know,a lot of blue collar work has been
replaced, and people haven't been upin arms about that in the way that
they are up in arms about AI. But the thing I was thinking of
recently was drum machines. So thisis this is this is really weird.
(26:12):
I remember growing up, the attitudetowards so much electronic music, at least
in my circles, was one ofkind of active disdain. Like I you
know, I recall people talking about, you know, like electronic music as
you know, computers playing music orsomething like that, you know, and
how you know, it was devoidof soul or you know whatever. And
(26:34):
nowadays that perspective seems seems totally ridiculous. But you know, for many years
in the early aughts, the ideathat you would have a computer playing music
actively seemed to annoy a lot ofpeople in that you would be taking jobs
away from musicians. And I remember, like I can remember several like goofy
comedies that like display like an archetypeof an electronic music person, and it's
(26:56):
always like this weird little dweeb whois anti social versus you know, like
the power rock guitarists or something likethat, which are you know, cool
and hip and sexy. And Ithink that's so interesting. That was a
really serious, like cultural perspective thata lot of people had for a long
time. And nowadays, you know, that's that's more or less gone,
and it would be ridiculous to saythat, you know, electronic music killed
(27:18):
music or anything like that. Soyou know, I do want to maintain,
you know, like a healthy perspective. I don't know how AI is
going to be used. The aspectsto be that I think are most interesting
are when it hallucinates. That's whatI'm into. I think it's cool to,
you know, to misuse AI andto see what it does, you
know, because it's going to beevery once in a while, it's going
(27:41):
to be spuriously brilliant. Like yousaid, there's one side of things where
that's obviously something we've seen over andover again, is this fear. But
there's also a side of things oflike being still cautious and aware of what
some of the implications will be.And yeah, I agree it Like,
you know, you're bringing up ourvideo being online of course, and what
(28:03):
that's going to look like in thefuture, and the direction that deep fakes
and things are going is can definitelybe a whole other rabbit hole and overwhelming
to think about. But I think, yeah, as long as we keep
talking about these things and you know, everyone's able to have more I think,
honestly, not to get to like, I don't know, cheesy,
(28:25):
but I do think more conversations andmore like working together in these interesting spaces
like what you've created at Dogbotic,having a collective where there's a lot of
different perspectives and opinions, you know, working together and creating new things and
playing with new things and leaving thatopportunity for experimentation, and that will all
(28:49):
inform, you know, the directionsthat some of this goes. So I
want to be conscientious of our timehere. I feel like we could go
on and on about some of thesethings, but we're going to to wrap
it up shortly, so we havea few kind of quicker questions for the
end here. Really quick actually,before we get into them, though,
I did want to hear how youguys came up with the name Dogbotic,
(29:11):
because I'm sure people are curious wherethat came from. Dog Bodick was named
after I wrote down a long listof really silly names. The mentality of
dog Bodic was it's a ridiculous nameand you have to have a sense of
humor in order to consider hiring us. And it's actually worked out pretty well.
I think. You know, thereare so many unfun audio jobs that
(29:34):
have to be done, and Idon't know how, but for the last
five years we've been able to avoidthem. That is a huge accomplishment.
Yeah, you're doing something right there. Then do you remember any of the
names you guys crossed off the list? One I do remember was harmonic dog,
also dog related, which is oneof the many dogs in George Clinton's
(29:55):
Atomic Dog that he lists at thebeginning of the song where there's you know,
the rhythm dog and melodic dog,coromonic dog. But I think someone
else already took it or something,so Dogbotic is what we got. Not
too far away from that, Yeah, no, no, not too far
off. Everyone likes dogs and everyonelikes robots. You know, nothing funnier
than a robot dog. Data.Do you have a robot dog? That's
the next question. No, wedon't. You need a robot dog mascot.
(30:21):
Some people have like made little likesculptures of them and something. Man,
we have a lot of illustrators ofshoot, I don't know if they
can even show you this. Wehad a whole bunch of illustrators illustrate different
robotic dogs for like a series thatwe did. Oh that's fun. So
we have a bunch of them.But yeah, they're like a little kind
of exquisite corpsey thing where you canflip through them and make the robot dog
(30:42):
of your dreams. Yeah, veryfun. All right. And for our
last couple of questions, what isone non technology related thing that's inspiring you
currently? Oh gosh, what isone non technology related thing that is inspiring
me currently? How do you definetechnology? I think that's up to you.
Oh jeez, a non technology relatedthing that is inspiring to me.
(31:06):
I'm going to go with a fishtaco. Fish tacos are new to my
life, but they're they're absolutely delicious, And I don't know why nobody told
me this before. There you go, that's my answer, confident. How
new to you are they like acouple of weeks ago, a couple of
months? Yeah, yeah, I'dsay three weeks. Three weeks ago I
had my inaugural fish taco and itchanged my life. What can I say?
(31:32):
You know, I'm wow, I'mbrand new, gotta spring my step,
you know, honestly not surprised.Fish tacos are delicious, and I
can't believe you've had your first onethree weeks ago, especially because how long
have you been in California? Exactlyright, you raised the obvious question.
Yeah, clearly too long for this, but well, I love that answer.
(31:55):
That's definitely that's definitely unique. Wehave not had someone respond with food
item before. So there you go. You get points for originality and last
but not least, what's on yourpersonal bill of materials also totally up to
interpretation. I thought of a coupleof different ways to interpret it. It
can be in terms of electronic components, it can be in terms of musical
(32:15):
instruments, or it can be justin terms of sounds that I use a
lot in my work that are likemy personal toolkit. Well, now that
you've told me the three options.I want to hear all three, of
course, Oh geez, all three. All right, So let's go with
little electronic components. Five favorite electroniccomponents. I will say the CD four
(32:38):
zero nine three nand gate. It'sinterpreting that as a thumbs up. A
fantastic integrated circuit, a very popularone. You can do so many musical
things with it, and it wasnever intended to be a musical instrument.
It is simply a logic gait.But yeah, you can hook it up
as an oscillator, as an inverter, as so many different things. I
(32:59):
would also include the relay. Ido love a good relay, so yeah,
so a relay is a little electromatic. It's electro mechanical switch right.
You can give it a little tiny, you know, small voltage and turn
on a much bigger voltage. Sorelays are a lot of fun. I
love doing projects that, like,you know, turn on and off lights
or turn on and off you know, hot plates that have whistling tea kettles
(33:20):
on top of them or something likethat, and relays are a really pragmatic
way of doing that. I lovethe ISD eighteen twenty, also an integrated
circuit that was built I think forlike washing machines. Originally it can hold
like a ten second bit of liketwelve bit audio or something like that.
So it sounds terrible, but youcan buy them for really cheap and they're
really easy to work with, andso you can you can create a little
(33:44):
thing that can record a couple secondsof your voice and you can play it
back at different pitches or whatever.So I'm a big fan of that,
and that's really fun to teach people. Let's go on musical instruments. Five
favorite musical instruments. I'm going togo with the mandolin, my primary instrument.
The cello, also an instrument upbe relaid for a long time,
the bass clarinet, big fan,the chromatic accordion, and let's go oh,
(34:08):
I know these are my absolute favoritething. They're called yeah, like
whirly tubes. I think they're They'rebeautiful. These things are absolutely wonderful.
I incorporate them and a lot ofdifferent stuff I do. They're really really
cheap, they're fun to give outat concerts and have everyone whirl along to
(34:29):
them. So that's that's my numberfive, and the five sounds that I
use most frequently. Let's go withan orchestra tuning a submarine, sonar pinging
the sound of a bell on abooie in the ocean. I really like
the sound of I really love combiningthe sound of like electrical hum with the
(34:53):
sounds of choirs. That's a thingthat I've been doing a lot lately.
They sound really beautiful when you arrangethem together, so I've been kind of
using those. There's a lot oflike deep droney ba see pads and a
lot of my music recently. Andthe fifth sound I use really frequently is
this, which is a weird soundeffect that I can do with my mouth.
(35:15):
Wow, that I put in absolutelyevery job I do. Thank you
so much for that very thorough answer. It was a good question. You're
the first one to actually answer withelectronics components. No one has ever done
that, which is kind of surprisingwhen you think about it now. So,
oh, that's that's what I assumedthe definition. I know, we've
talked to a lot of engineers whoobviously know, you know, what a
(35:36):
typical bill of materials is, butpeople take it very like loosely. You
know, they'll say their tools orexercise or their families or whatever. And
I love that you just went no, no, no, this is great,
this is great. I love thatthis question gets so many different answers
too, So it's always super fun. And even within you know, engineering
(35:59):
or does artists kind of communities,it's always something different. So that's because
humans are awesome and different. Tomy family, if you're listening, I
love you and you will always makeit onto mind build materials. On that
note, thank you so much,Kirk. This is a super fun conversation
and I hope that we get theopportunity to work with Dogbotic more in the
(36:20):
future. And good luck with allthe upcoming workshops and things and bringing events
back live. And people should findyou will put the links in our show
notes. You can send us anythingyou're interested in sharing with our community as
far as that goes. But obviouslythey'll find you out that they know all
about you. So thank you somuch, Hey, thank you so much
(36:40):
for Jetta. This is a lotof fun. That was Kirk Pearson,
founder of dog Botic, on theimportance of having a space to research weird
and culturally relevant sounds. Their workand educational tools can certainly change the way
people interact with engineering tools and sounds. This has been the Bomb, engineering
(37:04):
a path forward. If you likethe Bomb, don't forget to subscribe,
rate and share the show wherever youget your podcasts. You can follow supply
Frame and Hackaday on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn YouTube, and design Lab at
supply Frame Design Lab on Instagram andTwitter. The Bomb is a supply Frame
(37:24):
podcast produced by Me, Magenta Strongheartand Ryan Tillotson, written by Maggie Bowles
and edited by Daniel Ferrara. Thememusic is by Anna Hogman. Show art
by Thomas Schneider. Special thanks toGiovanni Selinaz, Bruce Dimingez, Thomas Woodward,
Jin Kumar, Jordan Clark, theentire supply Frame team and you are
wonderful listeners. I'm your host,Magenta Strongheart. See you next week. What
I can remember several like goofy comediesthat like display like an archetype of an
electronic music person, and it's alwayslike this weird little dweeb who's anti social
versus you know, like the powerrock guitarists or something like that, which
are you know, cool and hipand sexy. And I think that's so
interesting. That was a really serious, like cultural perspective that a lot of
(00:21):
people had for a long time,and nowadays, you know, that's that's
more or less gone. In thisepisode of The Bomb Engineering a Path Forward,
we're talking about the process of turningengineering components into musical instruments and how
that has the potential to change manyaspects of our culture. At least that's
what my guest today, Kirk Pearson, founder of dog Botic Beliefs. Dog
(00:43):
Bodic is a music and sound researchcollective that's redefining what music is and is
working to make musical and electronics engineeringeducation more accessible today. Kirk walks us
through a brief history of the crossoverbetween engineers and musicians, how AI generated
music could deaden the more interesting aspectsof music culture, and why no matter
where you go, there's probably alovable eccentric in a garage building a strange
(01:06):
musical instrument out of spare parts.This is my conversation with Kirk Pearson and
this is the Bomb. We livein a time where design and technology touch
every aspect of our lives. Butwhere did it all come from? Who
designed it? How is it builtand brought to market? What will look
(01:26):
like in a year, two years, one hundred years. From the phones
and smartwatches that help us in ourday to day to the cutting edge spaceships
and three D printers that are leadingus into the future. Modern design is
constantly shaping the way we work,communicate, problem solve, and play.
And every new design, big orsmall, starts with an idea and a
bill of materials. I'm agenta strongheart, and this is the Bomb where we
(01:48):
talk to leading innovators in the techworld and celebrate the transformational power of design.
What thank you so much for joiningus today on the Bomb. I'm
so excited to learn all about Dogboticand sort of your story. How you
got to starting this awesome studio.Oh, thank you so much for having
(02:09):
me so My understanding is that youall are part music production studio. You
make original compositions and produce things forall different kinds of clients. You're also
a research lab, which I'm reallyinterested to hear a little bit more about
what that means in this space.And then, last, but of course
(02:30):
not least, you guys offer educationalworkshops for kind of all things music and
sound making and production and hardware andtechnology that goes into that. You make
some awesome kits. I love thegraphics and branding of everything. By the
way, on your side, it'sreally thank you a joy to kind of
look through. So tell us alittle bit more about how this all comes
(02:51):
together and what each part, youknow, kind of works on. Yeah,
well, it's a very hard companyto pitch people because it doesn't make
a lot of sense. But effectively, Dogbotic is a collective of musicians,
composers, sound designers, and creativeengineering types and we do all sorts of
projects together. So I'm a composermyself, and I started Dogbotic as really
(03:14):
an outlet for me to be ableto, you know, spell my music
for money. So I started out, you know, doing composition for film
and TV and sound design and stufflike that, and then it kind of
expanded into all sorts of other weirdthings. Sometimes people you know, needed
a very specific musical instrument engineered andI could build it, or you know,
sometimes people would need me to researcha very specific array of speakers for
(03:38):
a particular special effect or something,and so it kind of grew from a
purely creative studio into like a researchproject as well. And then over the
pandemic, in the first few monthsof the pandemic, all of that live
work just kind of dried up immediately, as it did for so many people,
and it took us a couple monthsbefore we realized, hey, we
(03:59):
know how to do a whole lotof this stuff, and everyone seems to
be at home now. So wecame up with the idea of teaching a
one off build your own synthesizer workshopwhere I would literally send you a big,
creative, whimsically designed materials and we'dspend two months together building it out,
you know, into a working synthesizer. And much to my delight,
that ended up kind of catching on, and we're still doing that four years
(04:23):
later. Some of the titles ofthe workshops are super fun, and I
love that you explained a little bitacross the range of what you all offer,
because there's I mean, so manydirections we could dive deeper into from
there, but we won't get toocarried away. But it's also interesting to
just hear how it's grown really organically, you know, from primarily this synth
(04:44):
workshop that could be you know alittle more straightforward to all these different kind
of curiosities that people have within thisworld. And I love that. I
think a lot of projects like thiswe try to do kind of some similar
stuff at Design Lab, where itcan be a really great foot in the
door to bigger engineering concepts and topicsand things that might be a little intimidating
(05:06):
or overwhelming. But having this kindof fun entry point with something familiar like
a walkman or a synth or youknow, any number of things can really
help people jump off into the deepend later of all things engineering and design
and production. I totally agree.I think that I say so much to
(05:28):
the point where it's kind of cliche. Is the great thing about building synthesizers
is you're not like building elevator brakingsystems. You know, in that when
you're building an elevator braking system,it better work the same way every time.
With a synthesizer, we're making wavesof sound that are culturally interesting totally.
I love that you brought up kindof the empowerment of building something hands
(05:50):
on yourself, because I think that'shuge and something I'm a big kind of
advocate for as well. Why Igot into building and making and I think
a lot of people because there's justsomething so satisfying about building something that you
know you might have used before oryou were thinking of and maybe it doesn't
exist yet, and you put itinto the world, you know, physically
(06:12):
by making it yourself. And I'msure you've had some amazing gotten to witness
a ton of kind of aha momentsaround that with your students, Oh for
sure. Yeah. Do you likeever get the I mean, I think
we're like roughly the same age,and I feel like, I don't know,
after so many years of building thingson a computer where absolutely everything is
(06:33):
tweakable and touchable, you realize thatnothing is tactile and it's you know,
you really want to you know,it's wonderful to be able to actually touch
something physically and move it around.So there's like an element of like unblack
boxing that I think comes for alot of people. And like even the
walkman thing, it's kind of crazy. We get a whole bunch of like
kids that have for for sure neverused a walkman before who take the workshop
(06:56):
and you know, get a lotout of it. So that makes me
really happy. So as I waskind of online stocking your background, I
was really interested to hear that yougot this opportunity to do through the Thomas
Watson Fellowship. You wrote in yourbio that you went all over the world
getting to work on compositions with experimentalinstruments, and I'd love to hear what
(07:17):
were some of these experimental instruments,What does that look like, what does
that mean? Were you building themon the spot, did you take the
same instrument around the world. Wheredid you get to go and what were
some of your highlights of that experience. The Watson Fellowship was a weird,
like you know, windfall for me, I got very lucky and I got
selected to do this project. It'sa really bizarre fellowship and that they awarded
(07:43):
to I think forty people a year. And the idea is you have to
leave the United States for one calendaryear and not come back and you can
research, you know, like youapply with a proposal, and my proposal
was experimental musical instruments. So mythought process behind this was I went to
you know, I went to musicschool where I learned to you know,
(08:05):
compose for the standard set of instruments. And the thing that I thought was
so interesting is that, you know, as far as the standard set of
instruments goes, the most recent onethat was, you know, has been
added to the canon is the tuba, which was added to orchestras in nineteen
oh eight ish or something like thatwas when it really became adopted. So
that's pretty old. It's before youhave an electric grid nearly at the scale
(08:28):
of you know, our grid today. It's before the sounds of electronics.
You know, even really people didn'tencounter sounds that were very loud too frequently
in the way that we think aboutit now. So the world, the
world sounds totally different. And ifyou were to take a person from nineteen
oh eight and drop them here rightnow, just think about how alien absolutely
everything would sound to them, evenlike my accent and volume of voice or
(08:52):
whatever. So I thought it wouldbe interesting to try to rebuild an orchestra
with a whole bunch of musical instrumentsthat were can temporary that catered in some
way to you know, the twentyfirst century ear end brain. And so
I did the Watson totally wrong.You're supposed to do something like go to
five different countries or something, andI went to twenty two because I have
(09:13):
the attention span of a goldfish.But I mean, I'm at some truly
incredible people. Really, in everysingle corner of the world, there is
some lovable eccentric in a garage whois building a strange musical instrument, and
so much of the community building overthe course of the Watson was you know,
you meet one guy in Costa Ricawho says, hey, you've got
(09:35):
to meet this guy in Peru,and then you go to Peru and he
says, hey, you've got togo check out this guy over here,
and so, you know, sothat's kind of how it happens. It's
a it's such a weird, nichehobby, but you know, it's it's
it's strange how people are motivated by, you know, kind of kind of
similar things in the Quest for Soundsthat nobody's heard before. So so many
(09:56):
follow up questions. First, Iwant to re wine a little bit to
you saying that technically the newest instrumentto or the latest instrument was the tuba.
That just like blew my mind fora moment in the orchestra. Yeah,
in the orchestra, right, whodetermines that that that was the last
(10:16):
the latest instrument to enter the orchestraofficially and that sort of thing. I'm
curious what the governing body as faras that goes, is great, So
yeah, the official orchestra governing buttNo, So yeah, there's no there's
no governing body or anything like that. Music history is kind of strange.
The tuba was actually, interestingly enough, adopted really widely for recording reasons.
(10:41):
If you've seen like those you know, early Edison recording devices, which is
what we were working on prior tolike nineteen eleven or something like that,
you know there it's like you're engravinginto aluminum or wax or something, and
in order to move that stylist upor down right, you really got to
like shout into a tube. Soaround that era, when you know,
(11:01):
when physical recorded media became a thing, certain sounds like you know, a
plucked bass sound just didn't really pickup very well. Sounds like deep brass,
which are rich and resonant. Thosepick up really well in wax.
So you'll notice if you look ata whole bunch of pieces of music,
like a lot of jazz standards fromthe nineteen tens and stuff like that,
it's all tuba parts, no stringbased parts, and all the string bassists
(11:24):
last a job for a couple ofyears until recording technology improved. So yeah,
so there are a lot of weirdtechnological reasons that the tuba was favored,
but it was. It was.It started to be incorporated into our
chestral music around ye around first decadeof the twentieth century, and then eventually,
like it kind of just became codifiedbecause it appeared in enough arrangements.
(11:46):
We have to take a quick break. But when we come back, Kirk
tells us how a community of buildersand makers can lead an engineer to places
they never would have imagined. Welcomeback to the bomb Engineering A Path Forward.
(12:09):
I'm your host, Magenta Strongheart.When we left off, Kirk was
spinning their tail globe trotting for experimentalsounds. And no matter where you go,
it seems people will always turn nonmusical items into instruments. Okay,
So the other part of what you'resaying is that you went to twenty two
different countries in a year, andyou mentioned that, you know, it's
(12:31):
kind of happening organically. It soundslike you would go to one place and
then they introduce you you need tocheck out so and so here and that
sort of thing. And so howdid this kind of all culminate? What
were that I hate to be youknow, like, what were the results?
It's not about that clearly was anincredible, you know experience as well,
But what did this kind of turninto for you? And maybe even
(12:52):
regardless of what was required of thefellowship process, besides meeting so many amazing
people all over it sounds like whatdid you create from this? Right?
Well, the deliverable was weirdly small. The only deliverable that the Watson Foundation
mandates you do is you go toa conference and you give a ten minute
presentation on what you did for thelast year. So I did that passed
(13:13):
with flying colors. That was fine. But yeah, I mean I made
a lot of art throughout the year. I'm met a lot of really amazing
people and like a lot of themtoo, are like people that I you
know, I still regularly work with, which is kind of fun in the
you know, in my like inmy you know, commercial work. Every
once in a while, I youknow, I'm hired for a project that
needs something really really specific sounding,and you know, I have a whole
(13:37):
roll ofdex of people now that Ican you know, hire to record any
any number of wonderful and strange sounds. But I guess the real like thing
to come out of the my fellowshipwas Dogbotic. Honestly, I think it
was really formative for me to seeso many different i don't know, like
archetypes of creative communities around the world, and to you know, note how
(14:01):
some of them worked well in certainregards and didn't work well in other regards.
You know that that's you know,I loved every individual I worked with,
but I meant more of like thepolitics of you know, how how
one creates and how one exists asan artist in the you know, twenty
twenties, and so that that wasreally what came out of it. So,
you know, I started dog Botic, you know, kind of as
(14:24):
you know, as a means tobe doing the work that interests me,
which is, you know, searchingfor unexpected sound sources, making instruments and
composing with them, and uh yeah, all of this kind of grew out
of that. It's it's a it'sa fun, weird space to occupy,
but but I'm very happy with it. The instruments and inventing community is uh
(14:46):
is really really warm and really friendly, and I'm very lucky to be a
part of it. I can imaginehow inspiring and and awesome that experience was,
and I feel like I definitely havekind of similar moments of you know,
inspiration, just going to new places, meeting people that are doing things
(15:07):
in a different way, and likeyou said, seeing different different kind of
prototypes or ways that people are organizingor structuring means to be creative and also
you know, kind of financially sustainableand stable in their practice, which I
think is a huge obviously huge focusand topic of conversation for artists everywhere in
(15:30):
almost every kind of discipline, rightis like how do you balance the creative
side of things and the money makingside of things? You know? I
think that that's something that's as Iwas learning more about Dogbotic, something I
felt was going to be very interestingto our audience as well. Is to
see kind of what you've developed andhow you've organized you know, that that
structure within your studio as well.So I think that's actually a great kind
(15:54):
of segue to you mentioned you nowhave this great role deck, and you
have clients that you work with oncommercial projects of course, and one that
really stuck out to me that Iselfishly want to talk about because I'm a
huge Rihanna fan and I was abig fan of the Savage Fentee Volume four
show. So when I saw thaton your portfolio, I was like,
(16:17):
wow, I got to ask themabout this experience. So I remember watching
that and thinking the animated portions wereso interesting and not what I expected having
seen the previous shows that she haddone for Savage fenty and so I'd love
to hear more about how this projectkind of came together, What were some
of the most interesting parts of workingon it, how much of it I
(16:41):
know in some of what I wasreading about it, you know, it
sounded very collaborative. It wasn't justdogbotic working on you know, some of
the parts. But it does soundlike you all really concepted and kind of
designed from the jump, you knowwhat it was going to look like and
sound like. So tell us more. Oh yeah, it was. It
was a blast to work on.So my buddy Nicole Stafford, who lives
(17:02):
up in Oregon, she's an animator, uh, and we've worked on a
we worked on a number of projectstogether. We did we did an animated
short of hers called The Hork,which went to sun Dance during the one
year that it was canceled. She'sshe's a blast to work with. She's
got a really you know, wonderful, kooky sense of humor and also just
really like amazing visual sense. Soshe she works with the studio called Odd
(17:29):
Fellows. It's based up in Portland. That's been one of my favorite clients
to work with over the last severalyears. They're an animation house that does
you know, both commercial and artisticwork, and you know, we we
see eye to eye on a lotof things creatively, and so we've been
fortunate enough to work with them alot. And uh, yeah, the
Savage Fenny Show was uh, Imean yeah. They hired Nicole to do
(17:52):
these beautiful, surreal animated segments thatkind of bridged the you know, the
the acts of the of the show. And Nicole wanted to do these.
Yeah, so there are five differentvignettes that you know, introduced the next
artist, and they're all done inthe style of various, I don't know,
(18:14):
strange animators from the seventies and eighties. There's one that looks like Ralph
Boschi and stuff like that. Sothe sound was pretty part Blanche. She
really let me do whatever I wantedwith it, which was a lovely,
lovely thing about working with her,and so I, yeah, I was
able to get pretty it was ableto get pretty weird with it. So
a lot of the sounds that wehear in the in the sound design for
(18:37):
those segments are there are sounds thatI record myself, like you know,
me throwing rocks into the ocean orwhatever. But also a whole bunch of
like little homemade synthesizers that are youknow, not dissimilar from the kind that
we teach you how to build intoworkshops. So I really, I really
like kind of composing that way,Like I can build a circuit in front
of me, just have a liveaudio you know, feed of that going
(19:00):
into a computer and mess around forforty five minutes that I can kind of
go through that and lean the partsthat I like out of it, and
then collage with those I love thatyou kind of use the analogies of recipe
and collage. I think that's reallyhelpful, just I can say, at
least for me, who I'm someoneyou know, who's not so much in
the musical audio composition world here andthere, but very infrequently so to think
(19:25):
of kind of the way you're puttingthese things together. I think it's really
helpful to think of, you know, other ways that people think of structuring
something like a composition, or howthey work on a work of art.
In a way, as we're talkinghere, I was curious if you could
tell us as you were describing somethingsense too. I thought about it,
(19:45):
and what's you know in the roombehind you a little bit about some of
your favorite tools and the things youuse to make the things you have to
make, which is one of ourfavorite topics here on the BOTMB. And
for me personally, yeah, Ilike the recipe analogy. I think because
when you think in terms of process, you realize that by slightly changing your
(20:06):
process, you will change the outcome. I feel like music school, especially
kind of put me in a weirdbind where it taught me to think about
writing music as a very specific process, you know, like you might build
a chair in one particular way inyour wedgstop or something like that. You
know, but maybe that's not aperfect analogy, because you know, a
chair is ultimately functional. Yeah,when you're making a piece of art,
(20:30):
changing your process is a really greatway of changing your perspective. I think
like a lot of like a lotof how I was taught to think about
music was you have an idea inyour head, you pluck it out on
the keyboard or something like that,and you notate it down, and that's
how that works. But you knowthat's not how you have to compose.
I think it's equally valid to recordforty five minutes and weird sounds and pluck
(20:52):
out the best bits and you know, put those in a sequence. You
know, that's still composition. Tome, I was going to say,
as you were talking trying to connectit to the chair idea, I can
connect it for sure to some ofthe I think sculpture process that some of
my colleagues and I have you know, went through through school as well,
where it's like some people like towork in the kind of I guess you
(21:17):
could say traditional like you're saying,just like mine to notes to product.
Essentially, they have a vision andthey carve it out of wood or stone
or whatever it might be. Butthere's also I think there's a very i
would say, kind of common processof more this collage or assembly kind of
way where you're working with a lotof different modular parts, like you like
(21:40):
to make a lot of you know, little plaster casts for example or something
like that, and then you doa lot of these drawings and you do
this and these things very intuitively,and then it's what you know you're able
to draw together between these things thatmake the ultimate piece. And it is
this kind of collage or like yousaid, recipe where the process is really
(22:02):
informing you know, what's interesting aboutwhat you're able to create in the end,
So totally totally picking up what you'reputting down. Yeah, it's it's
all. It's all happy accidents.There's a fun Wikipedia rabbit hole if anyone
is interested. There's there's an articlethat's a list of surrealist games. Games
(22:22):
that were played by you know,like salons of French people in the early
twentieth century, and they're all reallyweird. They're effectively recipes. There are
things like heat some wax in apot and then throw the molten wax into
some ice water and it'll freeze intoa shape and take that out and sketch
it. Stuff like that, youknow, like they're they're just strange processes
that you don't know what the endproduct is going to be, but you
(22:45):
know the end product is going tobe interesting somehow, and so you know,
I think those kinds of things arereally fun to teach, you know,
because you know, I just wantto encourage people to make something.
You know, not everything's going tobe great, that's fine, rapid prototype
a lot of things you'll have somegood on Totally, Totally, it all
comes down to the editing, right. It's what you choose not to integrate
into the end that's just as importantas what you do choose to put into
(23:08):
it. So yeah, I lovethat. I'm definitely gonna have to look
that up after this and learn moreabout some of those games. That sounds
super fun. They're fun, goodgood Saturday night. Yeah. Obviously like
your kind of educational background, butalso the different parts of what you're doing
in the studio all work together andinform one another. Which I think is
very common and relatable to folks thatmove between kind of different disciplines or different
(23:34):
aspects of their practice. And soI'd love to hear more about how you
would say each kind of part ofthe business or part of your work informs
the other. How you know,maybe working with some of your students ends
up into some of your commercial workor into some of the research work,
and vice versa. Well, it's, for sitting, all related in some
(23:57):
deep metaphysical sense. But yeah,in another regard, the halves of Dogbotic
are you know, they they domaintain a little bit of distance, but
the processes that we teach are notdissimilar from the processes that we use when
we're hired, you know, todo to do work. I think at
(24:17):
this point I described Dogbotic more aslike it's a collective of artists and our
job is to find excuses to giveartists money to do things, you know,
whether that's through doing you know,commercial works art works or teaching these
workshops you know, and you know, that's that's how that model really works.
So I think that's kind of ultimatelythe thing that they have in common.
But yeah, I mean, reallyin the end like the you know,
(24:41):
like the I think the ethical perspectivethat I have with the workshops about
you know, how it's you know, it's important to take stuff apart.
It's important to figure out how theworld works. It's important to you know,
remember that you know, you canyou can make new sounds that have
not been heard, and you knowthose sounds have cultural significance to them.
Those are absolutely part of the philosophyof everything that we make in the studio.
(25:04):
No, that makes a lot ofsense. And I love what you
said about it's an excuse really toto give money to artists to make more
things because this is important works thatis and you know we all need to
eat. Yes, yes, ofcourse, But and I also don't want
to bring it up as like justlike a buzzword kind of thing. But
I am curious to hear perspective onwhat's kind of new in AI when it
(25:26):
comes to music production and sound design. What do you think is like,
you know, most promising in thatregard, And what are you kind of
more worried about if you're willing toshare. I'm worried about it making culture
even more bland than it already is. That's my that's my fundamental concern.
(25:47):
I think a lot of my concernsabout AI are really concerns about either culture
or or capital. Is it reallylike, I'm worried about people, you
know, people losing their jobs.But then again, for you know,
huns of years, you know,a lot of blue collar work has been
replaced, and people haven't been upin arms about that in the way that
they are up in arms about AI. But the thing I was thinking of
recently was drum machines. So thisis this is this is really weird.
(26:12):
I remember growing up, the attitudetowards so much electronic music, at least
in my circles, was one ofkind of active disdain. Like I you
know, I recall people talking about, you know, like electronic music as
you know, computers playing music orsomething like that, you know, and
how you know, it was devoidof soul or you know whatever. And
(26:34):
nowadays that perspective seems seems totally ridiculous. But you know, for many years
in the early aughts, the ideathat you would have a computer playing music
actively seemed to annoy a lot ofpeople in that you would be taking jobs
away from musicians. And I remember, like I can remember several like goofy
comedies that like display like an archetypeof an electronic music person, and it's
(26:56):
always like this weird little dweeb whois anti social versus you know, like
the power rock guitarists or something likethat, which are you know, cool
and hip and sexy. And Ithink that's so interesting. That was a
really serious, like cultural perspective thata lot of people had for a long
time. And nowadays, you know, that's that's more or less gone,
and it would be ridiculous to saythat, you know, electronic music killed
(27:18):
music or anything like that. Soyou know, I do want to maintain,
you know, like a healthy perspective. I don't know how AI is
going to be used. The aspectsto be that I think are most interesting
are when it hallucinates. That's whatI'm into. I think it's cool to,
you know, to misuse AI andto see what it does, you
know, because it's going to beevery once in a while, it's going
(27:41):
to be spuriously brilliant. Like yousaid, there's one side of things where
that's obviously something we've seen over andover again, is this fear. But
there's also a side of things oflike being still cautious and aware of what
some of the implications will be.And yeah, I agree it Like,
you know, you're bringing up ourvideo being online of course, and what
(28:03):
that's going to look like in thefuture, and the direction that deep fakes
and things are going is can definitelybe a whole other rabbit hole and overwhelming
to think about. But I think, yeah, as long as we keep
talking about these things and you know, everyone's able to have more I think,
honestly, not to get to like, I don't know, cheesy,
(28:25):
but I do think more conversations andmore like working together in these interesting spaces
like what you've created at Dogbotic,having a collective where there's a lot of
different perspectives and opinions, you know, working together and creating new things and
playing with new things and leaving thatopportunity for experimentation, and that will all
(28:49):
inform, you know, the directionsthat some of this goes. So I
want to be conscientious of our timehere. I feel like we could go
on and on about some of thesethings, but we're going to to wrap
it up shortly, so we havea few kind of quicker questions for the
end here. Really quick actually,before we get into them, though,
I did want to hear how youguys came up with the name Dogbotic,
(29:11):
because I'm sure people are curious wherethat came from. Dog Bodick was named
after I wrote down a long listof really silly names. The mentality of
dog Bodic was it's a ridiculous nameand you have to have a sense of
humor in order to consider hiring us. And it's actually worked out pretty well.
I think. You know, thereare so many unfun audio jobs that
(29:34):
have to be done, and Idon't know how, but for the last
five years we've been able to avoidthem. That is a huge accomplishment.
Yeah, you're doing something right there. Then do you remember any of the
names you guys crossed off the list? One I do remember was harmonic dog,
also dog related, which is oneof the many dogs in George Clinton's
(29:55):
Atomic Dog that he lists at thebeginning of the song where there's you know,
the rhythm dog and melodic dog,coromonic dog. But I think someone
else already took it or something,so Dogbotic is what we got. Not
too far away from that, Yeah, no, no, not too far
off. Everyone likes dogs and everyonelikes robots. You know, nothing funnier
than a robot dog. Data.Do you have a robot dog? That's
the next question. No, wedon't. You need a robot dog mascot.
(30:21):
Some people have like made little likesculptures of them and something. Man,
we have a lot of illustrators ofshoot, I don't know if they
can even show you this. Wehad a whole bunch of illustrators illustrate different
robotic dogs for like a series thatwe did. Oh that's fun. So
we have a bunch of them.But yeah, they're like a little kind
of exquisite corpsey thing where you canflip through them and make the robot dog
(30:42):
of your dreams. Yeah, veryfun. All right. And for our
last couple of questions, what isone non technology related thing that's inspiring you
currently? Oh gosh, what isone non technology related thing that is inspiring
me currently? How do you definetechnology? I think that's up to you.
Oh jeez, a non technology relatedthing that is inspiring to me.
(31:06):
I'm going to go with a fishtaco. Fish tacos are new to my
life, but they're they're absolutely delicious, And I don't know why nobody told
me this before. There you go, that's my answer, confident. How
new to you are they like acouple of weeks ago, a couple of
months? Yeah, yeah, I'dsay three weeks. Three weeks ago I
had my inaugural fish taco and itchanged my life. What can I say?
(31:32):
You know, I'm wow, I'mbrand new, gotta spring my step,
you know, honestly not surprised.Fish tacos are delicious, and I
can't believe you've had your first onethree weeks ago, especially because how long
have you been in California? Exactlyright, you raised the obvious question.
Yeah, clearly too long for this, but well, I love that answer.
(31:55):
That's definitely that's definitely unique. Wehave not had someone respond with food
item before. So there you go. You get points for originality and last
but not least, what's on yourpersonal bill of materials also totally up to
interpretation. I thought of a coupleof different ways to interpret it. It
can be in terms of electronic components, it can be in terms of musical
(32:15):
instruments, or it can be justin terms of sounds that I use a
lot in my work that are likemy personal toolkit. Well, now that
you've told me the three options.I want to hear all three, of
course, Oh geez, all three. All right, So let's go with
little electronic components. Five favorite electroniccomponents. I will say the CD four
(32:38):
zero nine three nand gate. It'sinterpreting that as a thumbs up. A
fantastic integrated circuit, a very popularone. You can do so many musical
things with it, and it wasnever intended to be a musical instrument.
It is simply a logic gait.But yeah, you can hook it up
as an oscillator, as an inverter, as so many different things. I
(32:59):
would also include the relay. Ido love a good relay, so yeah,
so a relay is a little electromatic. It's electro mechanical switch right.
You can give it a little tiny, you know, small voltage and turn
on a much bigger voltage. Sorelays are a lot of fun. I
love doing projects that, like,you know, turn on and off lights
or turn on and off you know, hot plates that have whistling tea kettles
(33:20):
on top of them or something likethat, and relays are a really pragmatic
way of doing that. I lovethe ISD eighteen twenty, also an integrated
circuit that was built I think forlike washing machines. Originally it can hold
like a ten second bit of liketwelve bit audio or something like that.
So it sounds terrible, but youcan buy them for really cheap and they're
really easy to work with, andso you can you can create a little
(33:44):
thing that can record a couple secondsof your voice and you can play it
back at different pitches or whatever.So I'm a big fan of that,
and that's really fun to teach people. Let's go on musical instruments. Five
favorite musical instruments. I'm going togo with the mandolin, my primary instrument.
The cello, also an instrument upbe relaid for a long time,
the bass clarinet, big fan,the chromatic accordion, and let's go oh,
(34:08):
I know these are my absolute favoritething. They're called yeah, like
whirly tubes. I think they're They'rebeautiful. These things are absolutely wonderful.
I incorporate them and a lot ofdifferent stuff I do. They're really really
cheap, they're fun to give outat concerts and have everyone whirl along to
(34:29):
them. So that's that's my numberfive, and the five sounds that I
use most frequently. Let's go withan orchestra tuning a submarine, sonar pinging
the sound of a bell on abooie in the ocean. I really like
the sound of I really love combiningthe sound of like electrical hum with the
(34:53):
sounds of choirs. That's a thingthat I've been doing a lot lately.
They sound really beautiful when you arrangethem together, so I've been kind of
using those. There's a lot oflike deep droney ba see pads and a
lot of my music recently. Andthe fifth sound I use really frequently is
this, which is a weird soundeffect that I can do with my mouth.
(35:15):
Wow, that I put in absolutelyevery job I do. Thank you
so much for that very thorough answer. It was a good question. You're
the first one to actually answer withelectronics components. No one has ever done
that, which is kind of surprisingwhen you think about it now. So,
oh, that's that's what I assumedthe definition. I know, we've
talked to a lot of engineers whoobviously know, you know, what a
(35:36):
typical bill of materials is, butpeople take it very like loosely. You
know, they'll say their tools orexercise or their families or whatever. And
I love that you just went no, no, no, this is great,
this is great. I love thatthis question gets so many different answers
too, So it's always super fun. And even within you know, engineering
(35:59):
or does artists kind of communities,it's always something different. So that's because
humans are awesome and different. Tomy family, if you're listening, I
love you and you will always makeit onto mind build materials. On that
note, thank you so much,Kirk. This is a super fun conversation
and I hope that we get theopportunity to work with Dogbotic more in the
(36:20):
future. And good luck with allthe upcoming workshops and things and bringing events
back live. And people should findyou will put the links in our show
notes. You can send us anythingyou're interested in sharing with our community as
far as that goes. But obviouslythey'll find you out that they know all
about you. So thank you somuch, Hey, thank you so much
(36:40):
for Jetta. This is a lotof fun. That was Kirk Pearson,
founder of dog Botic, on theimportance of having a space to research weird
and culturally relevant sounds. Their workand educational tools can certainly change the way
people interact with engineering tools and sounds. This has been the Bomb, engineering
(37:04):
a path forward. If you likethe Bomb, don't forget to subscribe,
rate and share the show wherever youget your podcasts. You can follow supply
Frame and Hackaday on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn YouTube, and design Lab at
supply Frame Design Lab on Instagram andTwitter. The Bomb is a supply Frame
(37:24):
podcast produced by Me, Magenta Strongheartand Ryan Tillotson, written by Maggie Bowles
and edited by Daniel Ferrara. Thememusic is by Anna Hogman. Show art
by Thomas Schneider. Special thanks toGiovanni Selinaz, Bruce Dimingez, Thomas Woodward,
Jin Kumar, Jordan Clark, theentire supply Frame team and you are
wonderful listeners. I'm your host,Magenta Strongheart. See you next week. What
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