A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better than the Competition by Margaret Heffernan

Author:Margaret Heffernan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781610392921
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2014-04-07T18:30:00+00:00

PART III

The Business of Winning

CHAPTER 7

Clone Wars

While many young engineers aspire to retirement at forty, Andy Hildebrand got his wish. He had spent eighteen years working on signal processing in the oil industry. Sending sound waves down below the earth’s surface produced reflections that, when correlated correctly, could map what the waves hit and where. For companies like Exxon, this was a critical tool for identifying oil reserves. That the stakes were high taught Hildebrand an invaluable lesson.

“It really gave me a sense of quality that is very demanding,” he tells me. “Coming from the oil industry, where people are going to spend maybe $300 million, $600 million drilling wells—you can’t afford software that fails. So I have this mentality that software just shouldn’t fail.”

Free to pursue his dreams at the age of forty, Hildebrand decided to study music composition at Rice University. He wanted to write music for symphony orchestras, but it’s tough to find full orchestras that are ready and willing to try out a neophyte’s student compositions, so Hildebrand started playing with synthesizers. His software expertise came into play, of course.

“At the time, synth playing was onerous because of limited memory, which meant that you could only do loops. So I reprocessed the synth so that you couldn’t hear the repeats. A friend said a lot of people needed that, you could make money doing it, but I knew there wasn’t a lot of money in music. I was just having fun.”

Hildebrand gives the impression of someone for whom having fun is a pretty serious motivator. Bearded, relaxed, and unpretentious, he has a talent for dabbling—and for listening.

“So I’d already sold a couple of pieces of software, and one day I was having lunch with my sales rep. And his wife was with us, and he happened to mention that it would be really nice if I could write something that would make it sound like she sang in tune. It was a pretty awkward moment; everyone just looked down at their food. But I knew right away how you’d solve that problem. I just didn’t think anyone would be interested.”

In 1997 Hildebrand didn’t have anything new to take to a trade show, so harking back to the lunchtime conversation, he decided he’d write the software for the sales rep’s wife. No focus groups, no market research. Just having fun.

“They ripped it out of my hands!” he remembers with a laugh. “I had a demo booth, and I’d pick an out-of-tune vocal, and in real time, it would be in tune. People were astounded. Not that it hadn’t been done before; others had tried and failed because the software didn’t work well enough. I guess there weren’t a lot of well-educated signal-processing experts in the music industry! But this did work well. That’s why it was a big hit—because you couldn’t tell, it sounded natural, and there were no glitches.”

“Dr. Andy,” as he’s now known in the trade, had created Auto-Tune, the world’s best-selling audio plug-in, which can shift the pitch of a sung note without changing the timing of the performance.

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