Difficult to listen

to? Difficult to listen to.

Very cerebral, very kind of high modernist, serious classical music in the proper way that you're supposed to.

And I found that I sort of had lost a reason for doing it in a way.

I went to study with Berio in Italy, who was a very eminent, brilliant man.

And he basically sort of picked apart my sort of edifice of academic justifications for writing this material and just talked about why I was even doing music, what was it for, really fundamental questions, which I hadn't really asked myself for a long time.

And so I came to the realization that really what I wanted to be doing is talking to people.

You did at an early age with building your own synthesizer.

Difficult to listen to? Difficult to

listen, difficult to, very cerebral, very kind of high modernist, serious classical music in the proper, you know, proper way that you're supposed to.

And I found that I sort of had lost a reason for doing it in a way.

I went to study with Berio in Italy, who is a, you know, very eminent, brilliant man.

And he basically sort of picked apart my sort of edifice of academic justifications for writing this material and just talked about why I was even doing music, what was it for, really fundamental questions, which I hadn't really asked myself for a long time.

And so I came to the realization that really what I wanted to be doing is talking to people.

Music is a communicative narrative form, a way to talk about things.

You did at an early age with building your own synthesizer.

As a composer, I, in a way, sort of coexist with a continuous stream of music, which is just sort of happening to me mentally at all times.

You know,

I've had this experience since early childhood.

Just at that time, you know, I thought these sort of musical fragments, ideas, melodies, but I thought of them like I thought of my other toys, just, you know, my building blocks or whatever it was, or my drawings, that I would just sort of play with these bits of music mentally.

And then, you know, later on, I found out that that was called composing and that you could do that as a thing to do.

And I sort of still have the same feeling about it, really.

I feel very lucky, in a way, to be able to make my life inhabiting this language, which I fell in love with in early childhood.

And that I found a way to integrate that with music.

As a composer, I, in a way, sort of coexist with a continuous stream of music, which is just sort of happening to me mentally at all times.

You know,

I've had this experience since early childhood.

Just at that time, you know, I thought these sort of musical fragments, ideas, melodies, but I thought of them like I thought of my other toys, just, you know, my building blocks or whatever it was, or my drawings, that I would just sort of play with these bits of music mentally.

And then, you know, later on, I found out that that was called composing and that you could do that as a thing to do.

And I sort of still have the same feeling about it, really.

I feel very lucky, in a way, to be able to make my life inhabiting this language, which I fell in love with in early childhood, and that I found a way to integrate that with music My other occupations, my other sort of life concerns, which are to do with really, you know, trying to interrogate the bigger questions of our lives.

And for me, music is a sort of, it's like a vehicle to travel through life.

How did that piece come about?

Yeah, that piece came out of a series of conversations I had with Julia, my partner, I suppose more than 10 years ago now.

I was touring in the States and she was back in Berlin and listening in to concerts that were being live-streamed.

And obviously this was in the middle of the night for her, you know, sort of three or four in the morning.

And she said to me that, you know, this is a very specific and extraordinary state to be listening to a piece of music in.

You're emotionally very wide open and it affects you very deeply in a special way.

And we talked about that and that this might be an interesting space to explore as a piece of music, as an object in its own right.

Well, you worked with Margaret Atwood.

As a composer, I, in a way, sort of coexist with a continuous stream of music, which is just sort of happening to me mentally at all times.

You know,

I've had this experience since early childhood.

Just at that time, you know, I thought these sort of musical fragments, ideas, melodies, but I thought of them like I thought of my other toys, just, you know, my building blocks or whatever it was, or my drawings, that I would just sort of play with these bits of music mentally.

And then, you know, later on, I found out that that was called composing and that you could do that as a thing to do.

And I sort of still have the same feeling about it, really.

I feel very lucky, in a way, to be able to make my life inhabiting this language, which I fell in love with in early childhood.

And that I found a way to integrate that with music.

kind of

very intense and rich encounter with this event.

And the first was that I had this feeling that there was a sort of, some sort of strange overlap between this sonic object and the experience of sunlight.

That there was a kind of a, somehow they fit together.

It wasn't exactly synesthesia, but there was this sort of, I experienced the music as kind of sunlight in a way.

And the other thing was that while I was listening, obviously followed the melodies and, you know, loved what was happening in the music.

But I also had this intuition that there was something else behind these sounds, a grammar, something which caused them to add up to more than just sounds.

But even in that connection, in that grief, there's a remembrance that I think is really important and really human.

Is that true in classical music as well?

I think what's interesting about young artists is you get the kind of, you know, like the first album is like all the things they've been thinking about for their entire life up to that moment.

Which is why the second album is so hard, right? Because it's like, oh, well, I've spent, you know, 18 years thinking about this music for the first album and now, 18 months later, I'm supposed to deliver another one.

It's tough.

I think with classical music, because it's composer-performers are not so much the norm, you know, it's more about just making the piece and And then the piece in a way lives its own life, actually.

It goes out and it just sort of finds its way.

And it's not so connected to the person, I think.

That seems more like the alternative, not the thing you would be taught in school.

But like everything, and like all technology, I think there's probably huge pros and huge cons.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the thing about AI is AI creative work made by these systems, um, I mean, obviously they're a variable quality.

Generally speaking, because of the way that over decades, I guess, you know, research dollars have gone into sort of speech recognition and language models, they're probably more advanced than the sort of compositional things.

But generally speaking, AI music is not very good, I think, at the moment.

Probably much less good than text.

But I think there's a bigger question because going back to this idea of other minds, creative work is about how a human being encounters reality and how they respond to that, and it's a way to share the experience of one human being with another human being.

... how did that philosophy completely change the way people think about capturing content?

Mm.

That's a good point.

Exactly.

You know, th- that, you already talk about, I would say the most convincing reasons for people to actually consider 360 camera, which is really that shoot first, frame later, which completely reverse the way of doing photography, right? Because you always had point and shoot cameras, so now you have shoot and, and frame later cameras.

And you know, at the beginning though, when we started to, to, with our first products like the Insta360 Nano, it was not very clear about this yet.

You know, we were in a space that, that was actually quite heated with competition.

So how do you guys stay innov- innovative in such a, a crowded market without simply just reacting to what your competitors are doing? How do you continue to lead the way here?

Is having set parameters in the way that you do frustrating or is it disciplining and helpful for you to have kind of a criteria almost for

Yeah.

I mean, for me, I really appreciate the particular properties of the different disciplines.

You know, a solo project, that's just me, you know, just trying to sort of follow the material.

A concert music commission, yeah, you know, if somebody commissions a... violin concerto, they're not going to want a brass band piece.

They're just not going to want that.

So there are parameters, you know.

Tell us a little bit about how that project came about and what you wanted for it.