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Headline: The technologists searching to recreate live music
An aristocratic entrepreneur and a new age inventor are planning a game-changing music app
For 160 years, since the first sound recording, technologists have tried to recreate live music. This quest has ramped up lately with developments such as the Nuraphone headphone, invented by a Melbourne ear, nose and throat specialist, and the 3D effect of binaural recordings.
Last month I heard the closest simulation of live music yet, played on a 23-channel French hi-fi that costs upwards of £500,000.
A London company, however, has launched an audio advance called Iris aimed at people listening to music on phones. Currently, it’s a free app which processes downloaded tracks to make them sound more “live”. Coming soon is a £300 headphone which incorporates the software.
I have been using Iris for a while, and remain a little awed. It even seems to squeeze audio juice from poor recordings. If you are interested, apply Iris to Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around”, slide the “integration” to about 65 per cent and see what you think.
I tried this on the most un-suggestible person I know, my brother. First he said “it’s just louder”, suspecting dodgy digital alchemy, but then: “No, it has a sense of presence. It’s uncanny.”
More significantly, music luminaries are starting to like Iris. That 65 per cent tip was from one of Queen’s sound engineers, Josh Macrae. The band members Roger Taylor and Brian May are among the investors in Iris.
“I was scathing about the idea. These kind of algorithms have been around before, but are poor,” Mr Macrae says. “After a while, though, I thought, ‘wow, this sounds really nice. The added warmth and top-end are pleasing.’”
Jim Selby is chief operating officer of Nashville record label Concord, which has also invested. He says: “They did a presentation here to Gary Paczosa, a multi Grammy award-winning producer. He was sceptical but listened to some of his own music, processed by Iris. He said: ‘That’s exactly how I want that to sound.’ That was proof for me that it wasn’t just a loud button. It truly is enhancing music. Some of our artists have heard it and love it.”
The Iris story has two elements that make it unique in tech culture.
First, the inventor, Don Estes, is a 70-year-old alternative therapist in Rustic Canyon, Los Angeles. I meet Mr Estes at his incense-suffused home. “This is where out-there spirituality meets technology,” he says. This is a tech innovator whose hall has a poster illustrating the “absolute scale of relative cosmic reality”.
Mr Estes is into expanding the senses using technology — it’s all quantum biofeedback, sound, light and vibration therapies, kinaesthetics and energy field modulation. He invented vibrating music therapy beds, and has a deluxe version in his home to which A-list celebrities come for a session.
Along with a coding whizz in Glastonbury, Somerset, he developed Iris, releasing it in 2012 as a $199 program, Psi-Fi. Mr Estes says that the app, which algorithmically replaces elements of live music lost in recordings, also has mental health benefits.
How Psi-Fi became Iris — now partnered with the likes of Aston Martin Red Bull Racing and whose claimed “wellness” effects are being studied by the Icahn School of Medicine in New York and at Goldsmiths, University of London — leads to the second unusual element in the story: Iris’s founder, Jacobi Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, is an insider in young royal circles and a half-brother of model Cressida Bonas.
He goes by Mr Anstruther and discovered Mr Estes while organising a California music festival. I mention his background because I think he may be the first aristocratic tech entrepreneur, with an office in Knightsbridge. “The quality of the audio Don was producing was a byproduct of what he was trying to do, activating the brain in novel ways, the neurological benefits of that and the sound healing world in which he’s immersed,” Mr Anstruther explains.
A hippy inventor. A royal-adjacent entrepreneur. It’s easy to say, cynically: “What could possibly go wrong?” Yet I think these guys have got something truly big.
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