When JJ Wiesler ’96 was concentrating in mechanical engineering, he loved to hole up in a little studio on campus and make guitar recordings. “I’d go in there and do everything myself and multitrack my work until I could make a composition.” That’s when he got the music technology bug, he says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m in.’”
Thirty years later, he’s made that work his life. He got his master’s at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics and today he is not only a founder but creative director and mixer at Pollen, a San Francisco–based shop that produces myriad forms of music, sound, and sound design, and engineering for everything from traditional films and TV shows to virtual reality (VR) projects for tech behemoths like Google and Apple. One project he found particularly cool was 2016’s Pearl, the first-ever Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning animated 360-degree VR short film, created by Google Spotlight Stories. “It required everything including the kitchen sink with respect to both creativity and technology,” says Wiesler. They had to write a song that would morph from a regular sound effect to a 360-degree surround-sound experience. “We actually had to instruct an engineering team how to build the tools in order to create that sound.”
Most recently, using the 3D sound technology Dolby Atmos, Pollen mixed the sound for Ultraman, an animated action-adventure Netflix film set in Tokyo. But perhaps even cooler than that is a recent immersive project in London called Brainstorms, in which listeners would be hooked up to an EEG while listening to a part of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, then, to the same music, would watch visualizations of “clouds” that their brain had made. “It was quite an ambitious science project,” he says, “but also a frivolous art project.” He adds that he finds that intersection of creativity and tech incredibly liberating. “To me,” he says, “the way that humans can tell stories and transmit emotions through sound is one of the most extraordinary phenomena.”