By Carla Calderon

This trip has helped me think differently on how I will approach my last semester at Berklee and how I will approach my future after graduation. Specifically, when we visited the D school at Stanford, they taught us how design thinking is important and some of the ways they set up the space to help their students be productive.

They use white boards, high top tables and stools to make up the work space. The students move around the white boards to make the space bigger or smaller and had a wall of supplies that were open for anyone to use. They stressed that open spaces are inviting. The white boards are an ‘artifact’ that students can use to explain ideas. One thing I will do differently is when I work on a project with other people and even myself, I will use a white boards to put my ideas down. I will also use an open area with high tables and stools. When we visited Mike Cassidy, he said when you’re building a company, build it in 3 months. He stressed that moving quickly is important. I will be taking his advice and although I am not currently building a company, I will use this mentally when completing tasks that I have. At Delphi, when they need to have everyone on the same vision, they use 4-7 key words and photos for each word to help bring the idea to life. I will use this not only for visual content when helping artists with branding but I can also use this when I am collaborating with others to make music. A takeaway that I got from Facebook and Apple is that to get a job in the industry, understanding code is important. I will start taking a class to learn how to code because it will be beneficial in the future. Dolby Technologies is helping artists by creating platform where music can be mixed in space instead of left and right. Knowing this technology is out there will be helpful when I am creating music. Thinking about space and how sound moves through it will be a new way of listening to music.

I knew that some tech companies need sound and music but what surprised me is the amount of sound and music that is involved will all the companies we visited. It was really amazing to see that creative people are needed in the world of tech and how it will start to be incorporated more and more. Specifically, what surprised me about PlayStation is how they set up the music so it can be incorporated into the video game. Having the intro, loop and then the outro to each part of the game is something I never thought about. Similarly, in Skywalker, when we saw the sound effects to Star Wars and Creed, I really understood then how important sound effects are for a movie and how many layers are needed to capture the scene. Another aspect that surprised me is how involved most if not all these companies are with VR, AR, and AI. Although we weren’t able to talk about this with some people, most stressed how they are in the works with it. It was a reaffirmation that they are working on tasks and problems that have never been solved before.

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