Entrainment & The Power of Sound with Tom Powers
About Tom Powers
Tom began his career in audio production in 1989, while he was still in college. He attended UW Whitewater College, in the southern part of Wisconsin, an hour away from Milwaukee, an hour away from Madison and about an hour and a half away from Chicago. Because of his location, he was able to get gigs working as as intern at some well known studios in evenings and on weekends where he started learning the tricks of the trade.
Upon graduation, Tom ran a professional sound and light company from 1991 until 2004. For ten years of that he built a service called “Bring the Studio to the Artist” He wrote a 24 channel dat rig, a digital audio tape rig, and traveled to the Artist’s location and produced the recordings on the spot.While this proved to be quite successful, it was a lot of gear to move around and required that Tom be on the road constantly.
In 2000, Tom made the decision to settle down and raise a family and look for a more stable source of income. He decided to start a cyber-security firm where he remained for 23 years. During this time he never completely gave up on his love of audio. Often doing audio side gigs in the evenings and on weekends.
During COVID, Tom began to re-think his career options. He felt that cyber-security was now a younger man’s game and he turned his attention back to his first love - audio recording. He decided that he wanted to get back to his “roots” so to speak, but didn’t quite know where to begin. He decided he might want to teach and enrolled in a Master’s program in Audio Technology in the fall of 2021.
He converted one of the rooms in his house into a treated studio, and started mixing and mastering, for artists around the world. He realized that during the height of COVID, artists everywhere had been making music in isolation using digital technologies but he observed the quality of the production, the mixing and matching was terrible - the music didn’t have the same kind of “stickiness” it used to have and he began to ask the question, Why?. This in turn led to him to the research around Interpersonal Musical Entrainment.
Tom realized the natural syncing between the artist, their music and the audience had been lost as a result of over use of digital technology.Drawing on his audio knowledge, Tom sought out an innovative solution to bring the “entrainment” back to recording, using the very technologies that had been responsible for its demise …The result was development of the “Four Bus” system.
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