PODCAST: "Keith Lay Composer, Educator, Entrepreneur" Transcript

MIKE REDMAN: Well. Hi, everybody. Welcome to GIG. I’m your host, Mike Redman. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing you to one of my very favorite people, composer, inventor, educator Keith Lay is without a doubt a calming force in the music industry. When I’m with Keith, my blood pressure goes down and when I walk away after seeing him, I feel smarter. You will too. So as always, let’s jump right in.

Hi, Keith. How are you doing this morning?

KEITH LAY: Good morning, Michael! It’s a beautiful morning here in Florida.

M: You’re probably 94. Yeah!

K: I didn’t say it was comfortable but it is beautiful, though!

M: There you go. Hey, I wanted to start this out – there’s something I wanted to say here: I think of you as one of the most thoughtful, joyful, talented individuals I’ve met along my journey. So I just want to put that out there at the start.  You asked me why we were even doing this and my thought was because you are that person, you know, and I like to spread your joy. So that’s why we’re here today. And we’ll move along, because I know that most of the people that listen to this, you know, they want to hear something that’s going to help them. So I shut up a lot! I learned to do that by about the maybe 30th podcast! I ask questions and then kind of shut my trap. So I wanted to start with this because it’s kind of how I met you, too. With Full Sail University, you were the, you can correct me – I’ll probably get the title wrong, the production chair at Full Sail for nine years or so. And so would you talk about what your role was there, what you did?

K: Well, like in a lot of kind of corporate situations, you feel like a team member and you do what you need to do, so you wear a lot of hats. Full Sail’s leadership: one of its strengths is that they give you room to help. It helps everything. So, the titles are important, in, like, all organizations that have a chain of command because you do need one when you have 2000 employees and 18,000 students. So my role there you know, before I retired a couple years back was that I was a department chair. There are more than one chair in a department and my duties were varied, but mostly they were managing a group of teachers. We call them course directors. Those are people  are the professors. And so I had a branch that was dealing with the technology at first, and mostly it was that sort of thing. It wasn’t teaching the music theory side of things. And, it wasn’t teaching some of the basic audio. It was more like final projects, Film scoring things that I do, too. So it fit pretty well. So the daily thing was I show up, I have my own courses that I teach, and then I have my folks [reports]. It had to do with scheduling people make sure that we were filling all the classrooms and that everyone was happy with their schedules.  We had lab staff and we needed to share them. Curriculum writing was up to each course director.  I had originally began the curriculum on the Music Production program back in 2009, and I had a role in it’s evolving. But, you know, you always give people that care about it [the course subject matter] the first dibs at writing it and changing it. You get them started and give them ideas if they’re not sure – and then it’s brainstorming. And that’s the best part about that school. We weren’t stuck to a [particular] text or some, you know, crusty old book or set of books or [industry inexperienced] deans or whatever [saying that] “it’s got to be this way”. [Instead,] it was like, well, what do we want to do? Okay, let’s teach. And that really puts a fire under people who like to serve others: what can I do for these young people?

M: Oh that’s cool. Keith, along with Full Sail, you somehow found the time to pursue a lot of pretty esoteric kind of endeavors. I’d like to talk to you about a couple of them. And I’d like to start with Deep Listening.

K: Yes.

M: What is it?

K: Deep listening is a composer’s practice. And when I say practice, it is a practice of – Let me just put it in a bag. It’s spiritual in a general sense. It’s psychological, mental, emotional and in the being sense. And it was created by Pauline Oliveros, a well-known composer for Deep Listening [composition techniques and philosophies], but also for electronic music. And electronic music has this really wonderful thing in the old days, you know, with electronic [music], when you were dealing with Buchla’s and Moog’s and stuff like that, the analogue stuff – you had to know what you were looking for and then [find] shape it. It’s like starting with a big piece of granite and you [first imagine] the sculpture, and you just have to remove the stone around it . It’s the same idea. And so what it did for [forced] people like her and me [to be able to do], because I did that too, is that you really [had to] start to hear things in a different way [the sounds they consisted of]. What she found in her world of classical music was that a lot of musicians don’t really hear: they passionately create gorgeousness, right?, and things that fit or whatever the emotion needs to be. But there was this gulf, this lack of of them really learning how to listen to the other person that they’re playing with.

 I mean, not that it’s just a tune, but mostly in in music that is improvisational. And she found that that it was really healthy for her and healthy for others too, to put down, maybe not put down their instrument, but put away the music and start just listening to what was happening. And and when we do Deep Listening, it is not just with the ears. It’s also listen[-ing] to your emotions, you listen to your body in general, you listen to your thoughts, you listen to your imagination. And all those things work together, all those aspects of who we are as people are brought forward in these beautiful things called sonic meditations, which are text based interactions that create music as kind of a side effect, but not really because we’re all listening to each other. But [if] you’ve learned to listen to nature, to the wind, to the shape of a tree, to all the ways that you feel – [those are what you use] to create.  And it’s designed into the sonic meditation text on how you’re supposed to interact with other people and how many and all.

M: The other one. Let’s talk train horns. Oh, yeah. Okay. Tell our listeners what you do with them. I mean, it’s an I call it an exercise in invention, music, physics, and a little bit of crazy.

K: I just had kind of the pinnacle concert. On the 15th of this month, in June, in 2024. And and I’m really glad to say it works. 

Speaker1: Oh, cool. Alrighty. There you go! It’s kind of amazing to see. I’ll have to say that.

K: I’m getting the video footage together now. So it’s not so much that I like the sound of train horns. That is not the reason I chose them. I chose them because they’re the loudest instrument you can have. They produce 140dB at one meter, each of them. And this last one [Distance Music Composition] I used six at a time. So it’s probably the loudest instrument in the world, which is sort of against my normal idea of nature and quiet and meditative.

M: Yeah. I’ll say!

K: But it’s the other side. It’s like this whole joyful celebration of sound and place. And because as you move your place,  you can meditate on space and the fact of being and the fact of being able to move to another place – [which is a ] kind of a mystery.

M: Can you explain a little bit how, like when I was there one day when you were doing it down in downtown Orlando, and, and the horns were placed on different buildings, and you had different groups of musicians on different places in different buildings in this composition. Can you kind of like paint the picture for us what it’s like to walk up on something like this?

K: Well the whole thing is based on the time it takes for sound to cross distance. And that’s why the horns’ [extreme loudness] are an important factor. Because they’re loud enough, they can be pretty far away. Faraway sounds sound cool to me the further away they get. It’s unfortunate though, if you’re really close to them [train horns], but you know, that’s why they’re on buildings, so no one’s going to get their ears hurt. But in the case that you were talking , those were FusionFest Fanfares for a  wonderful annual festival that we have in downtown Orlando. But I was using it [the train horn system as] what I call an organ.At that point I was simply using the train horns as this huge sound that fills the sky, but it wasn’t really distance music. The only distance music aspect was that I had to compute how much time it would take at that temperature for it [The sound from the buildings] to reach the stage in [front of] the audience. Right? So, let’s say it was 600 milliseconds, something like that. So, I would use the technology to push the train horns ahead in time 600 milliseconds. And then I gave the conductors home-built metronomes that would [indicate]  where the beat is so that in 600 milliseconds I had sound coming from one building, and then 300 millisecond from another building and they would combine. 

M: It’s it’s fascinating to hear. It’s wonderful to hear.

K: Really interesting because it does fill the sky. It’s like oh that’s coming from all these places. And they were. Yeah. Big giant chords that really helped lift the music. And I had a choir [and] African drummers.

M: Like I was experiencing Benjamin Franklin or something, you know, trying to  catch that lightning the first time, you know, and it’s because it’s it’s the infancy of where you’re headed with all of this stuff, you know?

K: The the main idea is this – I think I can distill it: So, I want to create music that has the same meter and beat as it takes time to travel, right? So I measure music in distance. So [in] this last [most recent] piece, a quarter note was 452ft long. And I choose a tempo. Right? So an eighth note was in the two hundreds [ms]. A 16th note was in the hundreds [ms]. Right? So [about] 100ft: that’s the time it takes for that 16th note to move [from one . So I have the center spot where in this one I put three bands spaced apart. It’s all very geometric. And so the audience knew where to walk. In fact, I could send you a [coughing from a dry throat].

 I should get some coffee. I ran out. But, [I provided]  people a Google map and they could see their blue dot on the Google map [to reckon their placement]. And then I had this piece of geometry [the “Circle of Life” figure] which happened to be sacred geometry, which is another subject altogether, so they [the walking audience]  could see where to walk in order to find these mathematically perfect places to [listen]. And when they arrived at that spot, all the rhythms lined up metrically. And [when walking away] that’s the way it drifts away into chaos. And then they walk to the next one. I [the live Google map] had ten points that they could walk to. 

M: That’s amazing. That’s where your mind starts blowing my mind. Where the heck do you see us going in the music industry with AI.

K: What a great question.

M: You know that there’s a lot of well-deserved fear now because it’s moving so fast. But there’s also opportunity. Right now the fear level is getting pretty high. And on every Facebook feed I have, man, it’s, you know, it’s this young girl singing with her new voice. It’s automatic songs being composed that sound pretty good. And then I was reading also where production music companies are going to be the first that start using them because it [useable and functional music is]  so easy to produce, you know, 100 tracks a day and mix them, you know. So what’s your thought on all this stuff?

K: For people who aren’t very creative and are people who are really good at Giving people what they want. I know that’s a weird way to say it. Yeah, they’re in super trouble, man. Yeah, especially since the last, I would say seven, eight years, the explosion of streaming and people creating this music library business where you just have a credit card and you can go find the piece you want and license it.  It’s so easy. Which is super important to why it blew up. And one of the reasons we created music production was because streaming created a 300% job increase for composers. And that was in 2009. And the labor industry even realized it. Right. The labor documents from the government. So it was that was one of the reasons we started when we did. So someone says, ‘hey, I want a James Brown-ish funk groove without James, but I need it with horns, and I need it to, you know, put in this little edge for this kind of emotion, whatever. And then you tag it [the file] really well so it has all the right things [descriptions] in it. You put it up there and people buy it. Well, I was going to do that now. Yeah. And it’ll probably do a better job because you can tell it how many seconds you want it to be, you know, and it’ll it’ll just be perfect. And, a human being can’t compete with that. I mean, maybe the microgroove that’s in a James Brown, if these guys were good enough that they found that micro pocket, which is, you know, if you’re talking about James Brown drummers and, you know, that is a special cool thing. Yeah. But most listeners wouldn’t care.

M: I was going to say most producers won’t even know that didn’t happen.

M: That’s right. They won’t know and they’ll be happy.  I used to make a living doing that stuff too.

K: Me too. So I, I can’t really speak from the seat of a young person who’s in the middle of it now, but I can only speak for me. And in the last, I don’t know, 25 years, I’ve just followed my heart and curiosity. That’s what’s led me into [these new directions] pieces, into what I do. Whether it’s an orchestral piece or whether it’s some kooky thing that I’m trying. Because I, I love life and I’m curious about things, and I write music to share an idea. And so I’m no longer in that business, so maybe I can [remain untouched by musical AI].

M: Good point.

K: If you’re really creative, I think you’re going to be fine. If you heard the term prompt engineer?

M: No. 

K: Well, I don’t know if it’ll stick, but I heard it, and I think it’s a good one. So there’s a new job category called Prompt engineer. It’s people who know how to handle and what to feed an AI efficiently to get the results. So maybe there’s going to be a prompt engineer aspect to music. It’s the same idea that if you’re using ChatGPT. For example, if you give it a whole bunch of prompts, like some people will maybe have 100 prompts. about [describing] the way you want the language to be. Yeah. And from what perspective and who’s this for and all these aspects? It’s it’s a pretty amazing. And it’s not like the average output that people get. It’s really good.

M: I have one last question for you, Keith. Yeah. You’ve been around doing this for a long, long time, and we’ll be doing it again. But what’s the best general advice you could give somebody entering the music today that might help them just, you know, avoid a couple roadblocks.

K: This is probably going to sound too vague to be that useful. Follow your heart. And what I mean by that I look back when I could have, and maybe should have, listened to my little inner voice and headed to L.A. with the Synclavier [the first powerful digital workstation] and taken some jobs I knew were there. Would have led to fame and fortune.

M: Yeah.

K: And I instead chose another path. And I often when I think about those paths and I think we all have things, well, it’s just life. You make decisions and think, I sacrificed this for this, and could it have worked?

M: Shoulda coulda woulda.

K: You need to just follow it [your heart]. Sometimes I wouldn’t – because I didn’t think I was good enough or I didn’t think that I would stay safe – and I wouldn’t jump out. And as an artist you do need to jump out with both feet, really, if you want to make it.  Is bad language allowed [to be] part of our this podcast or do you bleep it out?

M: More is better.

K: Yeah okay. Sam Rivers was a legendary – and just a fantastic saxophonist [and composer]. For many years we were close friends and I asked him, ” Sam, so how did you make it in New York all those years?” I mean, it’s like this fight all the time, you know? And as a jazz musician, he says, you have to be a motherfucker. And that’s [what I realized:] I’m not a motherfucker.

M: Yeah. 

K: You know. And so I  get that I’m a little soft around the edges, so I’m not going to be [a motherfucker]. And and I think that has to do with following who you are. And for better or for worse, most people don’t know who I am. And I think there’s a better in that I’m still creative and curious and healthy and love what I do.