Thomas Dolby

Thomas Dolby has spent his career at the intersection of music and technology. Perhaps best known for blinding us with science, he has always blurred the lines between composition and invention. As a London teenager, he was fascinated with the convergence of music and technology, and his experiments with an assortment of keyboards, synthesizers and cassette players led his friends to dub him “Dolby.” That same fascination later drove him to become an electronic musician and multimedia artist whose groundbreaking work fused music with computer technology and video, changing the sound of popular music.In the 1990s, Dolby recreated himself as a digitalmusical entrepreneur, founding Beatnik, a company that brought music to early mobile phones and the internet. From 2001 to 2012, Dolby served as TED's Music Director, programming great music for the TED stage, assembling a wide variety of house bands and collaborations to play between speakers. Now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, he directs a program that teaches musicians how to create for digital platforms.