posted in 2015, this text was I think an attempt at capturing the solitude and darker thoughts of a sleepless business traveller - and, boy, did I sleep poorly on most business trips (mostly, I now realise, to my FODMAP intolerance to onions and garlic. I clearly wasn’t on a business trip on the 27th of December, but remembering one - probably brought to mind by a similar poor night following a celebratory meal

Disorientated. Where? Dim pre-dawn - or streetlamp - light crept lethargically, reluctantly, unenergetically through a gap between blackout curtains. Energy aplenty thundered in audio form through the window and into the room: sound waves, but not homely. A hotel room. A truck, or a tractor. Almost military. No, not that - but east European. One east European truck or tractor followed by another: agricultural. A church or town hall bell, three simple rings. What in God’s time is it? Yes, three quarters past - quarter to - what?

Where, a hotel room in Romania. When, a quarter to. Who? And why?

Hand stopped half way to reaching smartphone and dropped back onto the bed. Time was unimportant now, as was place. This was him: a family man. This was him: a company man. This was him: an engineer. Half awake, three quarters not there.

So - a company man. Could that be a defining characteristic? If so, then he had changed. If not himself, then at least his company. He didn’t feel that different after all, even if he was now working for the competition. So - not defining. It was a new start, let that be sufficient for now (not this short now - a long now). Fresh perspectives and new beginnings had brought fresh motivation and impetus - surely to fade - but why not enjoy making new connections and revisiting old challenges with fresh eyes?

A company engineer and a family man: plenty of work to be getting on with. Reason enough not to be lying unasleep in a foreign bed, awaiting meetings, reviews, discussions, coffees and presentations with a whole new group of people. For what? Oh, don’t let’s go there now: there is no what for. Especially when the real question is: for whom?

I am why. They are why. You are why I read specifications line by line - especially the ones I have written; why I go through drawings item by item, FMEAs cause by cause, assign component attributes like a librarian, consider new developments like a patent lawyer; test parts, write reports, write emails, write presentations, travel to stranger places than this - and, from time to time, to write about it all here. For the company: your company.

Four more simple rings, followed by four sonorous ones. Two and a half hours to wait for the smartphone to ring, hopefully until then oblivious to time…

Whilst I’m no longer much of a gamer (I finished Half-Life 2 and got several hours into Oblivion before dialling down the game time), I do like to keep tabs on what’s going on in that world. Right now, the biggest thing since sliced zombies is Destiny,with its massively online save-the-solar-system campaign of dealing death to death-dealing aliens. Its creation was a huge undertaking, both in terms of manpower and financially.

One paragraph of one article about Destiny really stuck with me, though, and it didn’t have much to do with the game itself. The Guardian newspaper (I wonder if they got additional access because of the paper’s name?)  had a behind-the-scenes article about Destiny that described how large an undertaking it was. The project was so big and so complex, with so many people working from so many different perspectives in such a big converted cinema, that they created the position of “workflow engineer”:

“The company employs a workflow engineer, Brandi House, whose job it is to mediate between the art team and the programmers. “The team kept growing so it became harder to just walk up to the engineers' desk and tell them it’s not working,” she explains. “The engineers started to say, ‘Well, we have 200 artists – I can’t get any work done!'” House has a PhD in electrical engineering and is an expert in user interfaces – now she’s applying that skill with systems to a workforce, - she is effectively debugging the development team.”

This is the wonderful thing about engineering. It is so loosely defined that it can seemingly be applied as a concept to pretty much anything. For engineering to really kick in, that something needs to be complex (yes, a pencil is complex, if you look at it from the right perspective), it needs to be definable and there need to be adjustable parameters so that an optimum can be targeted.

Once you know more or less how something is, you can define - more or less - how it could, or should be, and how - more or less, once again - to get there.

So, whether it’s sorting out your early morning breakfast workflow, or designing your low orbit home rocket - or even if you’re nominally an engineer at work and want things to be better: engineer your destiny!

Lose Yourself to Engineering?

It’s fairly safe to say that 2013 was Daft Punk’s year. They brought out, to great hype, fanfare, and reviews their latest album, Random Access Memories, which made it into third place in The Guardian’s “Albums of 2013” list, behind John Grant’s Pale Green Ghosts in second and - in their opinion - Kanye West’s Yeezus in first (for the record)°.

I listened to Random Access Memories intently over the weeks following its release - and hated it. Then I loved it, finally settling for an awed respect. Nobody could put it better than Sasha Frere-Jones at the NYT: _“The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of ‘Random Access Memories’ repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I’ve ever heard… Does good music need to be good?” _ The opener, Give Life Back to Music comes across as an all-too respectful homage to 70’s funk, without adding anything to new to music at all. Yet, filter away the actual tune, inspect the nuts and bolts of the whole album and you’ll find so much to admire in the way it’s been assembled. It’s a damn fine engineering job.

Music is my main hobby, so with access to all the power that Cubase provides, I could conceivably compose and then produce something along those lines (though I emphatically don’t work in that direction).

Despite those bold words, though, I’m still fairly terrible at production, which is music’s engineering. A music producer (or audio engineer, as they are also called) has to work on ensuring that:

• voices (human or instrumental) have their own place in the mix,
• are clean and tidy, or dirty and scruffy, as desired;
• no frequency is overloaded, or uncomfortable to the listener

As I say, I’m not very good at it. Whilst I can appreciate a good mix, I tend to desensitise my own ears by overlistening to my own mixes, always wanting more (when less is by far the better way) andthereby muddying the sound to a point where it sounds acceptable to me on my own headphones, but is a disaster on loudspeakers, for example.

Music production consists as much of a workflow as product engineering does and goes something like:

• Audio mixdowns (exporting each track, whether synth, samples, humans or tubas into an audio file)
• Post processing:
  • Panning
  • Levelling
  • Equalising
  • Loudness
  • Compression
  • Distortion
  • Reverb
  • (and much more)
• Testing
  • Ensuring that none of those frequencies are overblown
  • Making sure no voices are lost
• Validation
  • pre-mixes
  • album-wide sound levelling
• Final mix
  • mastering and publishing
  • (gulp!)

For each step, the producers have a vast array of tools at their disposal for each step, but final quality control can’t be quantified away - it’s still in and between the ears.

Daft Punk had three things going for them in this intrepid exercise: lots of experience, a huge budget and a big team. Now, whilst the duo weren’t short of a penny or two given their back catalogue, it was still a massive investment on their part to go down the rout of maximising the human aspect of this album. It ended up being a massive, globally managed project, with all of the collaboration, communication and data transfer challenges that such an enterprise generates.

And all of that for, musically, a rather dull record.

It takes me back, perhaps controversially, to my days working as a packaging engineer at Ford. It was part of my graduate induction programme at the company and, if I’m honest about it, I felt that it was somewhat beneath me. Putting parts into boxes? What’s “engineering” about that, then?

All of it. It was, in reality, a complex puzzle that needed to be completed against time whilst ensuring the safe arrival of pretty much each and every single possible component in a car after transportation across half the world, with all conceivable qualities of route. More than that, the product and methodologies were endlessly optimisable.

So, working as part of a large global team, with a big budget, complex problems to solve, worse problems lurking behind any cut corner and bad, vending-machine coffee on offer, I came up with… a cardboard box.

If you’re in that situation, too, remember Daft Punk and Random Access Memories - your product may, superficially, be dull to much of the population, but, if you end up Doin’ It Right, it will sound great.

Happy 2014!

°(alright, and perhaps for a small boost in search engine findability, too… :-))