Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Jacob Collier & Ben Bloomberg: Grammy award-winning duo

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

In this episode, Kevin talks tech and music with Grammy-award winning musician Jacob Collier and MIT PhD Ben Bloomberg, who designs the tech behind the music. Their unique collaborations are breaking new ground in the music industry, leveraging innovative technologies to design, create and perform. Find out how AI is playing a constructive role in this amazing duo’s creative work. Click here for transcript of this episode.  Kevin Scott Ben Bloomberg Jacob Collier

Honestly, I think mastery is a myth. I don't think it exists. I think that no ideas are ever finished or new. Everything's just recombined. And I love that because it means that we get to be artists rather than inventors. You know, we can paint with what we know. And so I guess my job as a musician has been to learn as much as I possibly can. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm your host, Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft. In this podcast, we're going to get behind the tech. We'll talk with some of the people who've made our modern tech world possible and understand what motivated

them to create what they did. So join me to maybe learn a little bit about the history of computing and get a few behind the scenes insights into what's happening today. Stick around. Hello and welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm Christina Warren, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. And I'm Kevin Scott. On today's show, we have two very special guests, Ben Bloomberg and Grammy Award-winning musician Jacob Collier. And for those of you who tune into the show to geek out about tech and AI,

and you're thinking, okay, so what does a Grammy Award-winning musician have to do with tech? Well, kind of everything. Jacob Collier is a musical artist that has fully embraced tech as an integral part of the music that he creates. And he partnered with MIT's Ben Bloomberg, and the two of them have collaborated to bring their genius into the creation of song and video. And Kevin, I know that you've been so excited for this interview for quite some time. Yeah, I've been unbelievably excited. We've been trying to get Ben and Jacob on the podcast for a while now. And, you know, I have to say, I am an enormous fan of the work that these two do. I think both of them are outrageously talented.

It's probably the first podcast that we're recording where my children are legitimately going to be interested in, you know, in, in, in listening to it because everybody in the house has been bopping around all summer long, listening to all I need.

So I'm, I'm just super excited to chat with these guys about their approach to creativity and like how they have very cleverly merged art and technology into a set of creative endeavors that really have, I think, pushed the boundaries of how it is we think about music and live performance. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think actually, you know, this might be the sort of thing where the conversation

might be so great that this might even be something that we do in two parts, right? Yeah, for sure. So, like, we will split this conversation with Jacob and Ben into two parts just so we don't have to cut short any of the conversation. Absolutely. Well, let's chat with Jacob and Ben, and this is the first part of that conversation. Our guests today are Jacob Collier and Ben Bloomberg. Ben is a creative technologist who imagines, designs, and builds everything from electroacoustic musical instruments to AI-driven performances and tours. He's a recent graduate of MIT, earning his PhD. Jacob Collier is a multi-Grammy award-winning instrumentalist, songwriter, arranger, and producer based in London. He's up for three Grammys this year,

including Album of the Year. Jacob and Ben began collaborating about seven years ago, partnering to create Jacob's signature harmonizer and a truly groundbreaking one-man audiovisual show. Ben and Jacob, welcome. Kevin, it's so good to talk to you. Hey, how's it going? I've been so excited to have you guys on the show. So, you know, why don't we start with you, Ben, actually? Like, how did you get interested in music and this intersection of music and technology? Let's see. So, I grew up in Western Mass in a town called Northampton. And in Northampton, there's a ton of music. There's sort of venues. It's a small town, but a lot of big names would sort of stop through. And so, from when I was really young, you know,

my parents would take me to see, you know, all kinds of people, Lady Smith Black Mambazo, Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan even stopped in Northampton one time. And so, you know, I grew up with a lot of music and both my parents are sort of musical. And then pretty early on, I got interested in computers, probably starting in fourth grade and sound too. So I started working with PA systems and running sound for local bands and things like that. And I was, I guess I was only nine, so I couldn't even really lift any of the gear at that point. But I would get really into plugging things in. I grew up and started getting into all kinds of stuff, building phone systems and running sound and mixing.

And got interested in high school in adding sort of computers to live theater. And so I started kind of designing these systems where a computer would sort of centrally control all of the sort of infrastructure in the theater. And we would try to figure out how to sort of tie everything together so that the lighting and the sound was sort of integrated. And at that point, I started looking for college, you know, college programs that had both good computer science and good sort of live theater.

And I found the MIT Media Lab in this group called Opera of the Future. And so that was a graduate program. So you couldn't actually major in that as an undergrad, but I could work there as sort of an assistant. So I went there, started working, and sort of freshman summer ended up mixing an opera in England for my professor, who's Todd Macover, who's a composer. And so it was this big project with a huge orchestra and a lot of singers, and it was live. And it's my first time sort of on a really big mixing desk. And so that kind of snowballed and I started doing lots and lots of things like robot opera. And then 2014 came around and I saw this video, which was Jacob's

Don't You Worry About a Thing video and then Fascinating Rhythm. And I was just like blown away, of course, and started showing it to all my friends and like friends back home in Northampton, music people and people at MIT. And then one day out of the blue, you know, I just sort of thought, oh, what the heck? And I sent a Facebook message to Jacob just saying like, hey, hey, you're awesome. I'm at MIT. I like to build things. I don't even have anything specific in mind, but if you ever want to talk and build something together or just think about what's possible, that would be so, so cool. And so, I sent that sort of into the ether and didn't necessarily expect to get anything back. But then a couple of weeks later,

I got this message back from Jacob and we had a Skype conversation. And it turned out to be pretty awesome timing because, and actually maybe Jacob, you want to take over here. But you had just been offered this crazy show. Yeah, absolutely. I had this gig opportunity, kind of like my first ever gig, because I'd never really done a gig as Jacob before. I'd made lots of music here in my room and I'd been sharing it with the world through a variety of different avenues. But I'd never really of music here in my room, and I'd been sharing it with the world through a variety of different avenues, but I'd never really done a gig. And so it was this funny moment where I had all of these kinds of arrangements and these songs, and I didn't have an outfit that would really work on stage, per se. And so here comes this message from Ben.

And it was one of those moments from my perspective where I remember thinking, well, I don't know what this is, but it just feels right. It feels like it's the right moment to jump in and see what is possible and what this is about. And I jumped on that Skype call with about, I don't know, about 10 hours worth of Google Doc ideas of stuff to build and stuff to explore and all that stuff. And Ben was just so incredibly patient with me. So for folks who may not be familiar with you, like the, you know, one of the just extraordinary things about what you do and those early YouTube videos is that you have these beautiful layered textured performances where you do all the vocals like this mind-blowing harmony, and you play all the instruments. And it's a lot of vocals and a lot of instruments. And so I'm guessing translating that to a live performance has to be daunting. Because usually live performance, like you play one instrument,

you like maybe two, like you have an instrument, your voice. Exactly. It was profoundly a challenge. I didn't know what to do really but i knew that i wanted to reflect in some way the process of recording here and when i record here i have all these different layers right of sounds instruments chords grooves vocals whatever all layering up to make this kind of mosaic almost like a tapestry of sound and And for those early videos, I would record a video clip of me playing each instrument, and I sort of arranged them on the screen in these organized shapes. And you'd see the Jacobs, as it were, playing all the different ingredients. And so one of the first questions I had for Ben was, how is this something that we could translate

in a way that's not going to be a gimmick? Because a lot of the sort of live looping gigs that I've ever seen just didn't feel that great. You know, it's a very linear pathway to the end of the song. It sort of starts small and builds high and then you have to press stop and then everyone claps and you start again.

And, you know, I think what I was excited about and it turned out that Ben was, you know, kind of incredibly in line with this, was a human experience, something that felt like the music had multiple limbs, more limbs than I physically have, but still felt like it was an expression of one person, one thing, which led us slowly but surely into this idea of what a one man show might look and feel like and how on earth we go about designing that i saw an interview of you on the harry conick show where i don't know whether you had the harmonizer at that point but like on that show you were sort of frantically running around from like one instrument to another like trying to like make this performance with all of the tools but like there was there wasn't a simultaneity

uh about it uh like did you have the harmonizer at that point i believe so i i i think the harmonizer is pretty much the first thing that we dreamed up and built together and and ben i remember coming to your place i literally would have been six years ago i think like almost to the day actually um and i i stopped by and and we we started this thing because you know as you mentioned Kevin one of the things I love to do most is multiple voices and so kind of like 101 dream on stage was to be able to sing multiple voice harmonies spontaneously you know I not need to loop myself and stop time or press play on a track and all this stuff that sort of felt like it wasn't really

spontaneous and so in my mind there was this way of me standing on stage and playing the notes I want to hear my voice sing and then you hearing all of all of those notes sung by my voice in real time as a sampler so that was the thing that we sat down on your couch Ben and and sort of dreamed up and we made a really early version in about five hours that we kind of chipped away at. And then I ended up going home and I came back to finish it a couple months later. So Ben, maybe you can explain what the Harmonizer is. And I really want to hear about how you, like, this is not a trivial piece of technology. I want to understand how you got the prototype done in five hours. That sounds very impressive. I think the key thing, especially when you're trying to build

these prototypes, is sort of not to get wrapped up in implementation details. And so when we were trying to build it, we really just wanted to get as quickly as we could to something that felt really good. And so, you know, it wasn't about necessarily like we're going to try this weird algorithm or we're going to do that thing. It's just like, well, what do we have at our fingertips right now that we like and what can we sort of combine together in a way, you know, maybe we like, you know, these qualities of it, but we don't like this thing of it. So we'll, you know, we'll work on customizing something. And, you know these qualities of it but we don't like this thing of it so we'll so we'll you know we'll work on customizing something and i you know i think i think with these performance systems um a lot of people sort of have this idea that like we're going to build

everything from scratch and um and actually that gets pretty scary when you have a huge audience and and things like that so um so yeah you know we I remember, Jacob, you brought this thing called the TC Helicon Voice Live 2 Touch, which is sort of a classic kind of vocoding harmonizer. And we tried it out and thought, okay, yeah, this is great, but it only plays four notes. So, that's not enough notes for Jacob. And so, we should add more notes. And how can we do that? And so, a lot of that first day was just trying to figure out how to take a bunch of four-note harmonizers and allow us to have like, let's say, 12 notes or 16 notes. And then we started thinking about sort of the quality of each of the voices in the harmonizer. So most harmonizers, you know, they'll have some attack and decay for each voice. And a lot of the ones that we found, we didn't quite like that envelope.

And Jacob wanted to play so quickly. A lot of the, a lot of the harmonizers had like a little fade out, a little decay. So then a big part of it was figuring out how to get each voice to stop like instantly after, after we, you know, after Jacob would release a key. And then we started looking at latency.

Cause again, with, with, with a, with a harmonizer, you, you want to be able to sort of be nimble and have have lots of sort of agility in terms of the notes that are being played and

everything so so we we then tried to figure out how to do something that was sort of as low latency as possible and so you know we we started taking a lot of parts and basically combining them together and some of it was running on a computer we had the end, we had the TC Helicon in there too, but we modified it a little bit and it ended up in this 3D printed enclosure with some custom analog stuff on the front end. And that would be triggered for certain parts and then things in the computer would be triggered for other note ranges. And then because we were running the computer in there, we could sort of do it like a studio mix where we would have, you know, lots and lots of sort of processing on all of the voices

and then processing on the whole stereo mix. So we were able to sort of control dynamics that way and make it so that low voices are sort of in the center and high voices spread out. And so, you know, it's sort of all these little details. And it's really about figuring out how to get the feel to be sort of what we want. And then the hardest part, actually, is just making it so that it doesn't break when you're trying to use it on stage and it gets dumped off the back of a truck

or, you know, whatever happens whatever happens in touring checked as, as checked baggage. And, um, in some ways, in some ways that's the hardest thing because, uh, it's just incredibly, um, it's incredibly hard to, to make really, really rugged, really rugged gear. Um, have you, uh, so this is a weird tangent, but have either of you watched the Wintergatan videos, the marble machine videos? That looks like the most fragile machine I've ever seen. I don't know how Martin kept the thing together for the tour that he was on. That kind of stuff is super scary. And actually, when we started working together, I had just finished this robot opera, which was, it's a long story, but it was commissioned as a birthday present for the Prince of Monaco. And we did this crazy production, you know, sort of Broadway scale

with all these, you know, three 50-foot trailers of gear. And it was all custom hardware, all sort of custom robots that had been built from scratch at the Media Lab. And just seeing all that hardware sort of on tour and seeing all the really scary moments when things would fall apart or catch on fire or almost squish somebody or, you know, and it was an amazing show. But if it was just going to be the two of us and just starting out, I think when we started working together, I was sort of really sensitive to that. So we were really cautious at the beginning. And I think we've gotten sort of more and more adventurous as time goes on. You know, what I've done over the years with

technology, like you're sort of building things and you've got billions of people who use it. And so like, you're constantly worried about the fragility of things and robustness and fault tolerance and reliability and whatnot, because, you know, the consequences of something failing are like you just impact a lot of people. For you all, it seems to me that, you know, one of the special things about what you do with music is that, you know, done well, like you are completely capturing someone in this immersive emotional state and like mistakes you know like a cough or like they're they're very easy ways to sort of pull you out of that immersion and so like in that sense like the stuff really has to be robust right i think it's a mixture of being robust and then leaving space for being spontaneous.

And I think this is something that I'm kind of forever indebted to Ben at doing, was on that first Skype conversation and in those kind of initial dreaming phases of the one-man show and the harmonizer and all sorts of other things, there was never a moment where it was kind of like, oh, no, no, we can't do that. That's going to be too fragile or that's not going to work out or that's not reasonable for you to be expect, you know, whatever. It was like, well, if it's not possible, then we'll find a way to make it possible. And then I came to trust that process, not necessarily to end up where I was expecting it to,

but you know, there are a few different examples of things where we'd set out thinking I want to be able to do this live and then by the time we do it live it's really it's changed its its nature I mean I remember we started with the one man show having about 10 different foot pedals across the whole stage and I had I had to run around hitting all the pedals as I would play each instrument and then spring away from that instrument. But I figured out, well, what we figured out in trials was that if I hit that pedal, even a fraction of a second after the downbeat, it would loop the following bar, you know. And so there's only so much processing that my mind can do in one go about when I hit a button. And also how there's only so much I could do physically with my body um on stage at one moment and still be a human and musical and give energy to a room and

so you know that's an example of something where you know we kind of looked at each other and said you know what maybe we should just lose the pedals and let's have the loopers loop invisibly and let's just tell them when to start and stop looping and then and then I my job would be to to land just to land in front of them at the right moment in the song, play them for the right length of time and hold that in my head and run away and keep playing. And so things do change. But I think the thing about Ben is that there's always space for an idea to kind of be impossible for a little bit, because it's a very important fragile moment when an idea is being had, where you can't stamp on it and be too realistic. You have to dream. You have to say, no one could ever do this. Okay, let's go

and do it. And then obviously, once you get started, that's when my wealth of experience of being guided by what my idea of good and bad is creatively steps in, and Ben's massive wealth of experience about how things work the best, and what things things work well and what is a no-no and what is it what is a yes those kind of come in into fruition you know but there's that that lovely there's that lovely moment at the beginning where you just think whoa yeah we could do this um I guess I'm let's go for it yeah let's go for it I'm curious Kevin actually to ask you as somebody who has so successfully had ideas and implemented them, how do you have ideas and how do you assemble people around you to help those ideas come to life where the idea can be as safe, but yet impossible as it needs to be to be a good idea? Yeah, I think it's really, really, I mean, it's sort of the hardest thing about creativity, right? Especially, I don't know, like, so with engineers, you know, I think there's this mindset thing that maybe you're even born with where you sort of look at the world in terms of like all of the things that are wrong.

So you're just sort of constantly scanning things. It's like, oh, this doesn't work as well as it could. And, you know, like this is broken and like needs to be fixed, which is, you know, both a good and a bad thing. It's like a slightly jaundiced, you know, worldview, but it's also the thing that results in like, you know, this determination and drive to go, uh, like make things better. Um, and I think there's this moment when you get a bunch of technical people in the, or creative people in the room and they, they come to a problem with this. They've got this set of tools that they have, like they have an understanding of, uh, like how the world works, which is just that understanding at a point in time and they have

um you know they have their experiences about what they've you know tried in the past and like which things have worked and which haven't and like it's it's sort of hard at the beginning i think to overcome everyone's past so because you know, you'll have a lot of people in the room who are like, Oh, you can't do that. That's going to be too hard. That's impossible. Like, I don't know how to do that. And the thing that you have to do is figure out inside of those groups, how you can, uh, how you can give people the permission to like speak the the daring crazy thing and and not immediately get shot down where where they feel safe it's like oh no like you just don't want to tell people oh that idea is stupid uh so like part of it is about you know language and culture like one of the ways that we, um, we, we really, uh, admire the growth mindset

work out of this brilliant professor at Stanford. Uh, and like one of the things that we tell everyone is, uh, we don't want to be know-it-alls, we want to be learn-it-alls. And so if you think about all of this stuff as like a learning experience, it's like you have an objective in mind and like the process of like going towards the objective is learning how to get there uh then you you sort of wash away a bunch of this uh you know sort of cultural stuff that can blow ideas apart before you ever really understand whether they're going to work or not and i'm guessing that that sounds like you all sort of approach things very similarly. Yeah, I would say, I would definitely say so.

And it's really, it's lovely to hear you talk in those terms. When Ben and I, you know, for example, set out after doing this, this first show, which is at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, we were opening up for Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea. And there were 3000 people who had never heard of me or anything, or it was just completely, it was completely new for me and for everyone. You know, having done that gig, we set out on this, on this tour, you know, our first tour ever. And it's crazy. And the objective of that, if you, you know, if you think about it in those terms was, was kind of

unclear, you know, we wanted to have a good time and we wanted to play music and we wanted to make people happy, but we didn't really know past that what exactly we wanted it to be like and feel and represent. We didn't know why we were doing it. There wasn't really a reason that we were doing it other than just that it felt like the right moment to do it. And so Ben and I set out for a month of shows, maybe about 20 shows. And we had eight bags between the two of us. And that meant that we each had to carry four. And so I can clearly remember having a huge suitcase in my left hand, huge suitcase in my right hand, and then a great big rucksack on my back with all of the gear all the computers and stuff in it and then on my front the the stick bass the um the like double bass in it in a case that goes on a stand and ben was kind of equivalently bestowed um and we would be waddling around the states and we waddled across the whole the whole of the us and stayed on friends couches and all sorts of things and just feeling out what was good and and and what we loved the most and

then sort of building around that and even over the course of that one tour you know there were lots of different things that we changed um and i think for me having been used to a very kind of quick process of manifesting something that i like in a recording environment you know it takes me 2.5 seconds to change my mind and start something fresh. On the road, it happens at a different speed. And I guess, Ben, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on what this has been like for you and continues to be like. But, you know, at the end of every show, I would say, right, we need to change these six things about these six songs, and we're going to change the whole structure and remove the, let's speed this one up, change the key of this one. And Ben

was really good at kind of from my perspective of letting me do that kind of processing but also grounding me in the idea that we were building a show that had to run every night and if we change everything about every show every night then you're kind of starting from scratch and so that there was a real kind of mutual patience i think that we had to have about how that process evolved um and our sort of goal of working together emerged slightly further the more steps we put in the line you know but Ben do you want to talk to that at all? You know I think what's really interesting especially sort of in the world of live performances generally people are really risk averse and so every venue you go to every house

crew that you work with people are you know people's sort of reputations all of our sort of preconceived notions about what a show is and how you normally use your equipment and things like that. And let's, you know, and it's actually like in big bold letters on the front of the rider, you know, that says like, this isn't a normal show. Let's sort of work from base principles here. And so, I think that sort of mindset is what has really sort of pervaded and sort of evolved. And it took me a little bit, you know, I think, Jacob, you know, you definitely stretched me a lot because, you know, at the very beginning, you'd be did as a rehearsal show before the Big Montreux show. And it was like five minutes before the show started. And Jacob, you came up to me and said, we need to change the playback. We need to change. I forget exactly what it was. And I said, like, no, no, we can't change the playback right now. And it was, and it was like

the very first, you know, it was sort of the very first like sort of moment where we sort of had to say, okay, like, you know, we, we could change it. But every time we've changed something, there's been a problem and, and, and maybe we'll get good at changing things down the road, you know, and really flexible. But so far, every time we've changed something, there's been like a little hiccup. So we could change it and there might be a little hiccup. We just don't know and we can't test. So like, what should we do, you know?

What I've always tried to do with the technology products that my teams and I have built is you sort of got these two things. One is like the faster and the higher quality you can gather feedback, the quicker you can learn and the better you can make the thing that you're trying to produce. And so engineering your environment in a way where you can get that high quality feedback as quickly as possible is like super important. So like, that's one thing. And then the other thing is, you know, if you are thoughtful enough, you can usually understand the sorts of risks that you need to be able to take. And then it builds some systems to help you manage those risks so that you can like walk right up to the edge of something and even allow yourself to fail. Like a thing that we have in operations is this

thing called MTTR, mean time to recovery. So with software, I mean, like both of you know this, like there's no way to produce bug-free software. Like it is literally from a theory of computation perspective. It is, these are undecidable problems. Like you can't compute a solution to them no matter how powerful a machine you have. And so you have to reconcile yourself to the fact that you're going to produce things that will have errors in them.

And so the question then becomes, how do you catch as many errors as humanly possible before you throw something out into the world? And then like how once, you know, knowing full well that things are going to get through like how do you build your system so that you can recover from failures quickly and that is for software for products like that's a very useful way to think about the world like it just lets you move faster than you otherwise

would if you are constantly being crippled by the fear that you're going to fail. I think that's really important. And what's so special about Jacob is, you know, for all that the technology does, we really do have a lot of wiggle room because Jacob on stage can make just about anything feel amazing. And so there have been some pretty ridiculous sort of, I won't call them failures, but moments where things didn't quite go as expected. And if it were anybody else,

it would have been sort of a train wreck. And Jacob is able to take even the craziest things. I think like one time in Germany, all the loopers started speeding up and going up in pitch because one of the video operators pushed the wrong button at the wrong time. And like nobody else can handle that stuff, but Jacob can make that sound musical and, you know, keep the audience having a good time. So I think in that respect,

we were sort of really uniquely positioned to try out some pretty risky stuff. You know, he kind of makes it possible i guess i guess from from my just one thing from from my perspective on that um would be that i think ben and i have different uh kind of values different different um experiential values of control um and what when control is necessary and you know so know, so I know, for example, that when it comes to precision of musical information, I'm quite controlled because I kind of tend to know the highest resolution position for this note to be, for it to mean the most in the groove, for example. And I think less about, you know, things like, you know, is the flow chart from this element

to this element within the tech going to work every night in a way that means we can all have a good time? And I guess that means that there are elements of the tech which I'm stretching from my perspective and absolutely the same in reverse, where Ben, for example, will be very, very risk-aware in some scenarios, but then will also highly encourage me to jump off my own creative rails in a musical sense and

try new stuff the whole time you know and I think if there's one thing that comes from making music in one room for 10 years and then going on the road having never done a gig you know I don't tend to think about imperfections being great you know I tend to think about imperfections that aren't to plan being things that I will kind of want to correct and make sure that they are right it's not that they're going to be completely in a grid-based system all the time, but it's where I want it, you know. But one thing that I, you know, at first was very kind of, I guess I was quite intimidated by with touring, and now I'm completely in love with about touring, is that it's one of the only moments of your life where you have no room to be anything other than

just present. You just have to be present. And so a lot of the mistakes and the imperfections, we've ended up designing the whole show to let those shine even more than we used to. And so I used to think that the best gigs we did with the one-man show were the gigs where I nailed all the instruments. But it's just not true. And you were saying about an environment

where you can get instantaneous feedback. I mean, for me, that's just going on tour. And every night you get a fresh round of feedback. And it doesn't me, that's just, that's going on tour. And every, every night you get a fresh round of feedback and it doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter what the audience say to you after the, after the show, you know, they might say, oh, it was a great show. You know, we loved it or it was rubbish, you know, but you tend to sense just even just from standing on the stage and being you on stage, how that is going down. It was a real kind of a quick learning process of people immediately responded to the moments where I wasn't impossibly

perfect at something, you know, impossibly good at something. The moments where there would be space for me to be, yeah, wiggle around or something would go wrong. I can think of gigs where, you know, someone would cough and it would loop every time it would loop as part of the loop, you know, in the percussion loop, because it was really quiet and someone would yell or scream or a plane would go overhead or whatever that will get that will become part of the groove of the song and that's a fun that's a that's a fabulous challenge musically how do you make that make sense but you have to be willing to look a little bit like a fool and just sort of embrace it and and i think for me one thing i've learned really is is how special it can be when everyone's kind of doing that together. You know, audience and performer alike are both coping with this strange curveball and alchemizing it into something that feels really, really great, you know.

Yeah, I mean, so like, I love to like, sort of press on this a little bit. Because I can't tell whether these two things are different. So you have these amazing performances that you do in front of audiences that feel to me, at least, like they have this very improvisational character to them. And then I watched you do things like your I Harm You videos where someone will send you a melody or a tune and you create this harmonic texture around it. And you sit there for hours sometimes in front of Logic Pro and you've got hundreds of tracks. And your process is fascinating to me because you tweak and tune. On the surface, that seems like it's a different thing

than the live performances, but maybe it's just the same thing on the same continuum. I would say it definitely is the same thing. It's a similar expression on a different scale of time, I guess. You could say one is real time and one is stock time, but they're both kind of explain a bit about what I've done or what I'm thinking or what I like or whatever. And that happens kind of in a way that's new every time. There's a scenario in which it's reasonable for me to do that. But I think for me, I used to think they were very different. I used to think, oh, well, I'll be recording my room and then I'll go on tour because, you know, touring, that's fine. And then I'll come back home and

really continue doing what I love to do. And then you realize it's the same thing. It's like a different limb of the same beast. You're making an idea happen at the speed at which you're having it. And when you're in a studio, that speed is in some ways slower than when you're on the stage. If I'm on the stage at the piano, then I'm playing as I'm thinking. And I'm jumping through hoops as I find the hoops. And in the studio, the whole process kind of takes longer to occur. If I imagine an orchestra in my mind, I can't play the whole orchestra into logic at once, but I can play each instrument at a time and build up the layers.

And that kind of concept of visualizing and executing is very similar. But I think that you need a different set of tools in different situations to do that. I recorded this album, Jesse Volume 3. Last year in 2020, it's part of my quadruple jesse albums it's a four album series and and and ben and i did a lot of sonic sculpting and mixing on this album and more than ever i've learned from ben the value of listening to sounds uh from a very different perspective than i'm used to because when i listen to a sound i hear it as music and a piece of musical information which is not the perspective that always makes sense. For example, in the mastering process or the mixing process or the spatialising process or whatever it happens to be. And so Ben has been able to lend me his perspective, one of many,

many perspectives that I've learned from about how it's possible to experience something in a new way, which changes the way that I look look at something which is really valuable so that the skill for example of getting something to sit in a space when you're wearing headphones is a different skill that decides whether it's an e flat or an e natural that needs to be in this f major chord you know but the expression of something the spirit of something kind of being manifested i think is i think is the same. And I would say that whether we're sitting down building tech or whether we're on stage improvising with an audience or whether we're recording in the studio or collaborating with another artist or whatever, there's normally

a sense of push and pull and you normally bring a set of values in. But I guess I would concur with your rather than be know-it-alls, be learn-it-alls thing, where you have to kind of walk in with a blank canvas each time you step into anything and just have some kind of faith that it will be fine. And I think that's something that Ben and I have had to learn and have learned probably from each other about just executing thing after thing. Because after a while, you think, well, you know, maybe we can stretch this even further, because what's the worst that could happen? You know, the worst that could happen is that everything breaks, and then you just play the piano, you know, and there's a joy in

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Make a list and let it flow. so one of the things that i find super inspirational about both of you is what you do is such a multi-disciplinary multi-skill thing and like you you have these collections of skills and you know i think one of the like really interesting things about these like crafts or arts that require a lot of technique is when you do it well, you know, people don't really see like all of the struggle and the challenge and the difficulty of mastering the skills. And, you know, with with ben you know you you know you're you it's software it's uh you you know and like a particular type of software like you know you you probably understand signal processing extremely well which is like very mathematical

like you were talking about in the harmonizer you know you're doing stuff with 3d printing you've got analog circuits in this thing uh like you know so you have accumulated this giant bag of skills to go do something like jacob i have this guy works for me jaron lanier who uh is like the father of virtual reality who uh is like also one of these uh polymath sorts like he plays uh like a crazy range of instruments and actually has one of the largest uh i think the largest uh collection of uh private collection of musical instruments in the world but like you you sort of play everything and it's not just the instruments it's like your voice is just unbelievable what you can do with it and then you have this, you know, the music theory that

you have at your disposal. And then you've got these tools, like not just Logic Pro for composing the music, but like you just sort of figured out, like, I don't know whether it was intentionally or accidentally that you can use the internet and YouTube and like all of these things to collaborate with people. When did both of you decide that accumulating like all of these things, each of which requires serious effort to master, that that was worth doing on such a broad scale? That's a tough one. I don't know if you feel this way, Jacob, but I would say I don't necessarily feel like I have mastered anything.

I think we definitely do a lot. I sort of feel like we're guided by not wanting to accumulate these skills or find new things to explore. But it's just sort of in the moment, like, oh, yeah, we want to make a music video. So we have to learn about, you know, raw camera post-processing workflow and, you know, cinema lenses and things. And it's just like, okay, we'll do a little bit of Googling. Like today I have to calculate, you know, if we're going to shoot this video, how we can fit four Jacobs in the frame with this specific lens and that specific sensor. And it's just sort of a, well, we've already talked about it. It's what Jacob said, you know, it's the sort of, well, we can do this, you know, and let's just take this risk and let's have fun. And this isn't intimidating. It's sort of a fun new world to explore. And I think we do that sort of over and over. I don't know.

I don't know. What do you think, Jake? I completely agree. I mean, I think, I mean, everyone's a fraud, right? No one really knows what they're doing in anything at all. I definitely feel the same as Ben in the sense that there's nothing I've mastered, you know. And honestly, I think mastery is a myth. I don't think it exists. I think no ideas are ever finished or new. Everything's just recombined. And I love that because it means

that we get to be artists rather than inventors. You know, we can paint with what we know. And so I guess my job as a musician has been to learn learn as much as I possibly can and I never stopped to think about learning it I just learned it because well of course I'm gonna I of course I want to understand how why why this works here or well of course I it needs to be further to the left in the frame or well of course I need to be able to sing on stage in multiple voices let's just do it you know because there was never a moment where i thought well no i shouldn't be doing it or i can't do it um and i i think that there's a certain attitude of just kind of believing that it's going to be fine um that enables things to happen which is one of the reasons i was so curious about about your process kevin with within teams but you know i think for me, I didn't see anyone at school

when I was growing up who could play the bass or the drums or the guitar in the way that I wanted to hear them being played. There were lots of great musicians, but I wanted to hear a particular thing. And I figured that not for any kind of particular reason other than just I wanted to be efficient, I figured, well, I may as well do it myself because I know what I want more than anyone else knows what I want. And that's kind of a positive and quite relaxing realization. It's like, okay, well, then I'll do it. I'm not going to do it in the right way, probably, or the way that's right by the rules. But I love to bend stuff. And it's funny looking at the industry, the music industry, and it's filled with people who are really trying desperately to imitate each other so that they may compete on on the same kind of on this well-trodden scale of of hip and cool and and accessible and short and

over compressed and stuff and and you sort of think well if if i if i assume i'm i'm going to have fun making music then i i might just make my own path that's a different one from that, because then I'm always going to be where I need to be on it. And there's no kind of moment where I think, well, surely the right way of doing it is not this, or surely it's X, Y, and Z that would be more appropriate for this, that, and the other. And so I'm not a brilliant piano player or bass player or drummer or singer or anything, or arranger or video editor or whatever. But I do trust my intuition to kind of lead me in the right direction. And I guess in some ways saying, you know, is recording a song at home the same process as performing on stage? I guess it's the same as if I play the piano, is it the same as playing the guitar? Well, no, it's not the same, but it's still, it's a different dialect of a similar thing, which is kind of like believing that you'll learn something, you can learn something from everything you ever do and that you're willing to do it, you know, and you're willing to put yourself on the line and sort of embrace it. And I don't think about my skills as individual at all. I know

Ben's the same. And there are so many things that Ben can do, but I doubt you'd say, oh, I can do this and this and this, because they're all kind of different strings to the bow. And I think that in some ways that's what people are, but we have a society and a culture where we kind of tend to say i do this and this is me my my top level i'm a musician you know but but i really yeah i look i think what you just said is is it's a very very important mindset because like look the reality is like you you may not feel like you're a master at these uh individual, but like there, there, you know, there is like a threshold, right. Of playing the piano or playing the guitar where, you know, like you start and like what you're getting out of the instrument is not to like, you know, get the notes into your fingers, like where day because uh you know like i need to get to level 10 on the you know on the piano mastery chart it's like no this is part of a thing that i want to do or that i'm intensely curious about and like i'm just gonna i'm just gonna play and

practice until you know i i get it to where i need it to be for this thing that I'm trying to achieve. I think you're so right. I remember two things. One is I remember my mom offering me piano lessons when I was eight years old, because all I would do all day long is sit and piano play cluster chords, you know, oh, cool. And I remember my mom saying, you know, short piano lesson. I remember just saying, no, I don't want piano lessons at all, actually, because I'm fine. I'm just going to go at my own pace. And I don't really want to be the best piano player. I just want to be the best at being Jacob that I can possibly be. And she was really kind of with me on that. And I'm very, very grateful to it. And the other thing I was going to say was, when I started making videos, I realized that in order to play them for the

camera, I had to learn how to play them. I would, I would record these bass lines. And I remember back in the day, you know, recording one note at a time and editing it into the place where it sounded funky, you know, cause I couldn't play it, but I knew I wanted it to go, you know, and so I would go and then did it and then did it. And I edited it to go and that was fine, you know, and obviously it's, you know, I think, oh, that's not the way it should be done. But then I turned the camera on to do the take and I just had to, I had to get it together. And so I did, you know, and at that point it wasn't a matter of, oh, am I good enough? You know, should, am I really qualified enough to be playing the bass? You know, it was just, well, I've got such a defined

objective that there's no possible way I'm not going to get this together because I have to. And so there was something really joyous about that for me. Yeah. And I think everyone listening should re- be able to figure out how to, like, put all of the skill together to accomplish the thing and then just joyously pursuing it is the way that I think you make great things. I'd say so. Absolutely. And, you know, it is easy for us to say that because we're doing, you know, I think we're all doing pretty crazy stuff right now, you know, and it's the hardest to do that were there at the beginning when maybe we were just playing single notes. Or like, you know, when I was building a phone system and my parents were like, well, are we still going to be able to call 911 if you're like taking over all the phones in our house, you know? And sort of the trust and the support there, I think we're both really lucky.

And now we're sort of fearless, but it's this self-fulfilling process. You know, it's sort of, you do it once and then it's like, oh wow, that felt good. Like, let's try something crazier. And like, that's why, you know, this most recent, like Jimmy Fallon thing, for example, we're like both doing things that we've never done before,

you know, and the end result has to like be submitted for primetime television, you know, and it worked out in the end, which is a crazy thing and another good feeling, right? We've had this interesting thing going on over the past year with the pandemic where everybody is distant from one another physically and you know what we're all trying to work from home and it seems like there's some really cool artistic stuff happening from that so like you have what you've been doing with jesse volume three and like taylor swift has put out uh two albums and you know like people are sort of exploring new ways to like make art and be creative that i think is really uh really amazing and like one of the interesting things um

like i i i know you're up for album of the year actually against, you know, Taylor Swift. Not that it's any sort of like against or competition or whatnot. It's sort of a joyous thing that you're both nominated and like you both made beautiful things. But like the things that you've made are very different. Like hers, like I don't know whether you've seen the documentary she made about her album that's on Disney Plus, but it's like this beautiful, wistful, like almost melancholy thing. It's almost like she's sort of taken this, you know, sort of moment with the pandemic where like you're a little bit isolated or isolated in a way that you weren't before and just like gone inwards. And it's like very thoughtful and, you know,

reflective. And like what you've done is like, you've, it seems to me like you figured out new ways to connect with people. And like, what you're producing is joyous. I mean, like really joyous.

I mean, like I I've, I've been, I've listened to your music so much over the pandemic because it just makes my mood better. And like, you've collaborated with all these amazing people and like, you're, you know, staging these performances, whether it's like BBC or, you know, CBS, you know, Sunday morning or, you know, Jimmy Fallon, like, like you, you've just figured out how to, like, do this pandemic thing in a joyous way. Like, how, like, is that deliberate?

Or, like, just, you know, you're just, you know, trucking on, keep being Jacob. Crikey. I mean, man, it hasn't been easy for any of us, you know. And I think we've all had different struggles at different moments. I think there was a kind of natural momentum that I found going into March, where I had all of these kind of ideas and energy, and we were just about to go on tour, actually. And it was this crazy moment where four days before the rehearsal started, and it was sort of like, this is not happening, you have to go home now and stay at home. And

I had been running for two or three years through this kind of seemingly never-ending tunnel of like thing that's very intense that I have to do right now and never any space to think about anything else. And I remember when I heard the news that the tours are going to go ahead, my biggest kind of emotion was in some ways was relief. It was like, wow, that means that I don't have to go on tour. And I was devastated about not going on tour, but that means that no one knows what's going on right now. And that was, for me, was a really interesting moment because you have to recalibrate, you know. And what I find is that if you just give something space, then it will grow. I've also been very lucky, I guess as Ben said, with my family, because my family are automatically very nurturing towards space and time. What it meant was I was able to spend time with those guys and just dream up a bunch of stuff that I hadn't had time to

dream about. I definitely didn't plan it out. I didn't think, oh, well, what the world needs, because I've looked at the numbers and everything, it needs to be joyous. So I'm going to be joyous, you know. But I think that I was determined to give myself challenges to grow through because that's what sustains me as a human. And I was determined to connect with people because that also sustains me as a human. And I was relieved to have more time to work on the album, which I've been working on for some time. But looking back now, I know it was nowhere near ready back in March. And it was technically finished so that I could go on tour and release it, but it was not finished. So I'm really, really grateful for the time. But it's really

hard to maintain perspective. And we've had highs and lows at different times. Ben and I have never been closer despite having not seen each other for a year. We've done crazy stuff together. We've done all these shows, 350 gigs, and we've made four albums and all this stuff. But actually, it's been this distanced time with a little bit of perspective where we start asking each other the questions that really matter. And I can't help it. Life is also wonderful when you sit and pay attention to it. I think that's the thing. It's so wonderful.

And I think that what I found in the last few months is that a lot of the unconscious fears and the doubts and the self of the self-questioning all that really intense stuff that all comes to the surface in a moment like this and it's really hard but but if you can just get to the other side you realize how lucky we all are to be here at all you know and then if there's one thing I can do within my own life to find some kind of meaning and purpose where nothing else seems to make any sense that I make music that's what I've done since I was you know four years old and and so I really don't have an option there but I think the privilege is is that now I now have the choice as to whether to share it with the world and and I have a kind of a kind of creative self-trust that will that tends to get these ideas off the ground you know i was thinking during during your last

question i was i was thinking about this the fact that when i was younger you know i would take something to my mom that i'd recorded and i'd say hey i made this you know what do you think about it and that you know any child who's ever done this which is everyone you know you know how fragile the idea is at that moment you know and And all the parent figure that needs to say at that moment is like, I don't know, I don't think it's very good. Or, no, I didn't like that. And it's crushed forever, never to return. And so in a funny sense, if the parent says,

it's fantastic and you need to do much more of that thing and show it to all your friends and I'm very, very impressed and all that stuff, that's almost equally damaging. And there's this really, really kind of careful middle ground where the value of the idea is in the fact that you had it, not in what the idea represents or means or where it takes you or anything. It's just that you're having ideas means that you're doing the right thing. And I was so, so lucky to have that in my mum. I was brought up by a single mum and she was always open-eared for my ideas. It was always open to discussion, to dialogue. She'd bring her opinion about things in a really beautiful way where it was always my

thing and I could make up my own mind. And I think that finishing something and knowing that the value is that it's finished, not that it's good, but that you paid attention to it and that you're proud of it is a very addictive and wonderful thing in a sense. So maybe not addictive, but more-ish. Once you've done it once, you can do it again, but bigger, and you can do it again, but bigger. And songs turn into arrangements and arrangements turn into collections of songs, then they turn into albums and then albums turn into tours and then tours because you start dreaming in kind of higher and higher resolution. But that's because you were able to sit down with someone who believed in you. And I think I've had to be that person for myself a bit this year in a way that I haven't been used to. I've been lucky enough to have my

family around me, but Ben knows literally more than anyone in the world that I'll sit down and just think, what am I doing? I'm lost. Is this good? Am I good? Am I important? Am I too important? Is this all too consequential to continue? Is it not consequential enough? You know, and all these angry voices that vent at different things at different times on the internet. And, you know, it's really, it's a very interesting time. And it's a great big dance, you know,

if you're able to just step back and observe it. And it's tough, but I'm really, really looking forward to kind of entering back into a world where it's possible to take the lessons that I think we've all been learning over this time, creatively and otherwise, and kind of put them to use in real life. Yeah. So, one of the things that you just said, I think, is really, well, a lot of what you said is very important, but one thing in particular, which is this feedback that you got from

your mother or the feedback that you're getting from your colleagues uh like that that it's just so it's so critically important um you know and i i think you know your your mother's a violinist and a conductor and and a teacher and so like she you know she has practice giving people feedback and you know i i have the same thing with my daughter right now, who's 12 years old and trying to write a book. She's a voracious reader. And like, she's decided at 12 years old that she wants to write a fantasy novel. And you want to absolutely encourage that. But you also want to be able to give some feedback so that, you know, there's something constructive. It's like, okay, like, here are all of the great things that you're doing. And like the most, you know, wonderful thing about what you're attempting is that you're attempting it and you should feel really good about yourself

that you're doing that. And like, here's some things that, you know, you should think about to like maybe make it technically better. And like, if you get that wrong, you can crush someone, like especially someone who's starting and they're afraid and self-conscious. So, I don't know. It's a blessing to have those people around you who know how to give you feedback. Yeah. I think if someone makes space for you, it's contagious. You start making space for other people in some ways, too.

And I find that the kind of act of giving in that way just never ends. It just gives and gives. And so, if you give somebody room to have an idea on their own terms, then it seems to me like the kind of magic in that process will figure itself out. I remember being 12 years old, and I wanted to write a fantasy novel, actually. I have it on my computer somewhere, the novel I wrote, because I too was ravaging through these fantasy series, and I loved it, and I wanted to make these magical things come to life. And honestly, I was trying to find my outlet at that time. I loved music, and I listened to lots of it, but I loved writing and I loved talking and I loved playing video games. And there were all different ways I was

living out these kinds of spiritual dreams. I wanted a spirit of something to exist. I wanted to be putting it into the world and living it. And there are all sorts of ways you can do that. And I think it takes a mixture of boundaries and freedom to end up with something that works. And no one really ever gets it completely right. But that's wonderful. That's part of what makes us human. And Ben, I know you've spoken a lot about this to me as well, about the freedom that you were granted in your school environment and in your home environment, just to kind of be able to play meant that you were kind of, it wasn't that you, you know, like it might look on paper as though if someone gives you the responsibility of like the school production that, you know, you would go and mess it up because you didn't know what you were doing, but actually it doesn't end up

being like that because if you're given the space to figure it out, then you figure it out. And that's the benefit of trusting something is that it will give something back to you. And I think that's something that both Ben and I have been lucky with is that we were trusted at times where, I don't know, maybe we didn't have everything figured out, but we were able to figure it out I don't know, maybe we didn't have everything figured out,

but we were able to figure it out or at least start figuring it out because we were given the space to. I could talk to you guys all day long. This is so great. You guys are doing just such great stuff. I can't wait to see what you're going to do next. And I'm just confident, given that both of you are this fountain of creativity, that the what next is going to do next. And I'm just confident, given that both of you are this fountain of creativity, that the what next is going to be interesting. I'm sending you all of my best thoughts for the Grammys. I really hope you win Album of the Year. That would be so amazing. Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to to connect and talk and and yeah honestly i i feel like we could literally talk for you know hours and hours and hours and maybe sometime we should we should just get a beer in the real world and do just that you're really cool that that would be

great i would love to do that all right well thank thank you all so much. Well, that was the first part of Kevin's conversation with Ben Bloomberg and Jacob Collier. Kevin, wow, that was an amazing conversation. Yeah, I could have spent all day long talking to these guys. They are so incredible, not just in terms of the things that they are producing and the prodigious talent that they have, but I love their approach to creativity. They're so adventurous and fearless with what they're willing to try. And like they have that, you know, we talk about growth mindset all the time at Microsoft. They really do have a growth mindset where they just assume that they're going to be

able to learn what they need to learn to solve the creative challenges that they have set for themselves. There were so many notes that I was taking during your conversation because it was so good, you know, and that was one of the things that I really thought was interesting was you mentioned that fearlessness and that fact that, like, as you said, like, they had the permission to, you know, speak about doing that crazy thing, like, when you were talking about engineering without feeling like they would be shut down and having that willingness to just do something and pursue it, you know, and just to make great things without worrying about, is this going to work or not, but just saying, okay, we're going to do this.

Yeah. And that is, it's a common thing, I think, in many disciplines, not just the arts, but in science and in technology as well, where if you're trying to do something that really is new, the definition of new is that no one's ever done it before. And that's a frightening thing, like exploring the unknown. And, you know, having the right environment where you get the feedback that you need to ground yourself in reality, but also that gives you the encouragement to go attempt these bold, ambitious, scary things, I think is so important in any field or discipline. No, you're exactly right. And kind of on that note, I was thinking, obviously what Ben and Jacob do does kind of fuse the lines of art and technology.

It's very much art, but the technology helps inform that. But I was curious from your perspective, because you mentioned you're not a musician, listening to them talk about their approach, how much of that rang true to you and what you do with engineering? I think creativity is very similar across a bunch of different disciplines.

You know, so a lot of what they are, a lot of what they're trying to do is to make something that other people will like and enjoy and obviously they're they're doing that the success that they have seen you know the grammy nominations uh you know sort of a reflection of the the extent to which they have impressed their peers and then you, the commercial success that they've seen, especially recently with Jesse Volume 3, I think is a testament to how good a job they've done making something that impresses and resonates with a bigger audience. But the first thing that you really are having to do when you're creating something is like you have to have, you know, that intrinsic motivation, I think, to go do something. And again, I think it comes back to creating something new.

So when it is new and no one's ever done it before and you don't have an audience or you're building a product and like you don't have users, you have to have that intrinsic motivation, like what motivates you every day to go really just in some cases, bang your head against the wall because the problems that you're trying to solve can be really, really daunting and challenging. And, you know, in the early days, you're not getting much feedback at all. So you have to, you know, you have to really figure out like where your energy is coming from to go make a thing. And so like that, that mix of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, which I think you can really see with them. Like Jacob is very, very daring

in the creative choices that he makes. You know, I think Ben is very, very daring in the things that he's building to empower those creative choices. And, you know, that is, I think, coming from within, not because they had some desire to be famous. And I find that very, very interesting. Absolutely. Well, that's all for today. We were so delighted to have Ben and Jacob on the show.

We liked them so much that we actually had so much great conversation that they are going to be back on the next episode. So be sure to stay tuned to hear the rest of this incredible conversation. You don't want to miss it. Send us a message anytime at behindthetechatmicrosoft.com and thank you for listening.

See you next time.