How Music and Technology Connect Us: A Conversation with Rebekah Wilson - Part 1

Audio Branding

“So I’m in Chicago, I’ve quit my job, I’ve almost run out of money. You know, you’re young, you don’t care. And I met Robert, who’s now my co-founder. He had mixed a CD of mine a couple of years before through friends of friends. So we meet up, have a beer, and then he’s like, ‘Oh, you know, I’m spending all this money on IT every month,’ because he was a sound engineer. And he’s like, ‘But we’ve got this thing called the internet, right? I thought, ‘I’ve got 1 MB internet in my studio, why can’t I use that? It’s free.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ And because I, you know, had been doing software development and the internet, it just made sense. The two of us really bonded, and I went home to New Zealand and he stayed in Chicago, and we built Source-Connect.” – Rebekah Wilson

This episode’s guest is the co-founder, technical director, and CEO of Source Elements, and has worked for over twenty years with customers and industry partners like Avid and Dolby. Since the release of their pioneering remote audio app Source-Connect in 2005, she’s advocated for the benefits of remote collaboration in all sorts of areas, including sound engineering, voice acting, music performance and production, film and cinema production, and education.

Originally trained as a composer, she’s now a software developer and expert in the fields of music technology and networking, and, as a New Zealand native, she understands very well how important it is to stay connected no matter where we are. Her name is Rebekah Wilson, and you’ll want to hear what she has to say about how Source Connect is making our creative lives easier, what it’s like being a woman in a male-dominated field, and where she sees this technology going in the future.

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(0:00:01) - Musical Journey to Tech Innovation

We start off with Rebekah’s early memories of her father playing the guitar, and how it helped spark her love of music. “I must have been four or five,” she tells us, “and I can see the house that we were living in at the time. So, yeah, around their age and um, just those lovely, warm feelings.” She shares her experience growing up in New Zealand and how quickly things changed as the internet began to connect the world. “I went out and told everybody,” she explains, recalling the day she learned about Princess Diana’s passing on a web forum. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ And they’re like, ‘How do you know? The internet? What, that’s crazy!’ And so it was like one of those first moments of finding out that you can connect to the rest of the world with this medium.”

(0:11:06) - Navigating Gender Dynamics in Tech

Rebekah shares her journey from orchestral composer to tech entrepreneur in the ‘90s, and just how much things have changed for women since those early days. “I went in for the job interview and, uh, they, they show me where the programmers work,” she explains. “It’s a dark room in the middle of the building with no windows... and they have pictures of naked women on the walls.” We talk about her very first trade show, the rise and fall of ‘booth babe’ culture, and how a new generation of women are helping transform the industry. “These, you know, women in their twenties,” she says, “they don’t feel so isolated… this mentorship of older women is what’s become such a huge movement.”

(0:17:16) - Exploring Latency in Communication

The first half of our conversation wraps up as Rebekah talks about the science of latency, and how lucky we are that we live in a world where global communication is even possible. “Maybe the world could have been bigger,” she says, “or the speed of light slower, or our brains be a bit different... If you go back to, firstly, think about the evolution of the human brain and speech, we evolved to speak in small groups with each other.” She explains the limit the speed of light sets on latency and how technology has taken advantage of that limit. “That range of latency in which we’re able to compress audio, put it in a packet, send it to the internet,” she adds, “decompress it, send it out to the headphones. It’s just short enough that we can talk. It’s kind of the perfect, you know, Goldilocks spot.”

Episode Summary

• Rebekah’s childhood musical experiences and the intersection of music, math, and science.
• Her experiences navigating Australia’s male-dominated tech industry.
• How a perfect alignment of physics and neuroflexibility allows global communications.

Tune in for next week’s episode as we talk more about how latency impacts music production and reshape the creative process, her work with the Red Cross in Greece and Sweden, the evolution of online collaboration and remote music sessions, and Rebekah’s thoughts on overcoming the ultimate latency challenge: hosting conversations and collaborations across the solar system.

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