Seeing sound and hearing fonts with LJ Rich

Seeing sound and hearing fonts with LJ Rich
Mixing senses: Synaesthesia, AI and the unexpected music of fonts

Do you hear fonts? Can you taste music? 

In this episode of Seeing Senses, BBC technology presenter and world renowned AI music artist LJ Rich joins Sarah for a joyfully curious journey through sound, senses and unexpected connections. From AI for good to the serendipity of symphonies created by mass transit. LJ talks about synaesthesia, sensory pattern recognition and how this can unlock incredible problem-solving.

The episode includes a very special name that font game. This is (probably) a world-first music experiment that you can play along with.

//

Listen if you’re curious about:

• How sound becomes colour, texture, emotion and memory
• AI for Good United Nations global summit on AI every year
• How LJ uses AI as a musical collaborator
• Why our brains love metaphors and unexpected juxtapositions
• How patterns inspire creativity in stuck moments

//

Key themes & takeaways:

• Interestingness at the edges: Why unconventional thinkers make better models
• Sound is a shape, a colour, a taste: Inside LJ’s 3D multisensory perception
• Unexpected connections: The creative power of linking the seemingly unrelated
• AI as a collaborator: Labelled and transparent
• Music and memory: Composing Rubik’s Cube moves with melodies
• Typography as performance: How fonts feel and sound
• Oral culture & AI training: Why everyday conversations need a place in the dataset
• Multisensory dissonance: When a restaurant’s wallpaper spoils the food
• Permission to feel: A beautiful call to nurture creativity in all its forms

//

This episode features music created by LJ Rich. If you would like to see a selection of fonts during the name that font game head over to Substack.

//

Guest:

LJ Rich is a world-renowned AI music artist and TV broadcaster. Known for presenting on BBC Click, her one-woman AI-enhanced musical show has gained global recognition. She also MCs and co-curates high-powered events. She is considered a thought leader on how humans, creativity and AI are evolving. LJ makes the invisible layers of tech, sound and emotion feel gloriously human.
//

Bonus for multi-sensory thinkers:

Head to Seeing Senses on Substack for updates and extras.
You’ll find sense-hacking experiments and book recommendations from the guests. Become a paid subscriber to support the making of this podcast (with extra episodes and content).

//

Host:

Sarah Hyndman is a designer/researcher, author and speaker. You can book her for a talk or workshop about Multi-Sensory Thinking here via Type Tasting. Sarah is the founder of Type Tasting, curator of The Sensologists and author of the bestselling book Why Fonts Matter (Penguin/Virgin). 

Seeing Senses. Where there’s more than meets the eye. 

//

Theme music by AudioKraken. 

#Synaesthesia #AIMusic #MultisensoryDesign #SeeingSensesPodcast #MultiSensoryThinking

Transcript

LJ Rich (00:05.238)
New books, science fiction books, a delicious mango being cut up in a hot country, pomegranates being opened by professionals, watching people do art, painting, writing, drawing, physical art, circuses, acrobatics, performances, aeroplanes, trains, that beautiful rhythmic sound of going through and seeing the landscape on a train window transition from one type of thing to another. Somebody bringing you something with a pot that they lift the lid off for you to eat and the smell that assaults your body, hot tubs.cold tubs, swimming somewhere hot, swimming somewhere cold, everything, the world is there for us to enjoy and feel fully.

Sarah Hyndman (00:46.936)
My guest is the TV presenter and world renowned AI music artist, LJ Rich. Join us for an episode brimming with unconventional thinking, hope and encouragements. We talk about interestingness.

LJ Rich
We need to have those beautiful edges, those unconventional people, the unconventional thinking. Having that actually makes a model work better. Having these new creative unconventional thinkers can add a layer of interestingness.

Sarah Hyndman
The Origins of Music Notation.

LJ Rich
Music is really difficult to read because it was originally written down as a reminder of a song that you already know.


I love that. I love that idea. It's such a strange and wonderful concept. I do see it as tasting as much as smelling or seeing.

Sarah Hyndman
AI for good.

LJ Rich
Part of my role working for the AI for Good United Nations global summit on AI every year. One of the things that we're looking at is how AI can be used for good things that are good for humanity. There's so many amazing ways to use AI.

Sarah Hyndman
LJ has synesthesia. This means she experiences extra connections across her senses. If you're a synesthete, you might taste names or see sounds as color. Jamie Ward says in his lecture at the Royal Institution that people with synesthesia experience the ordinary world in quite extraordinary ways. Maybe you have synesthesia too, but you might not realize it because we often assume that others experience the world in the same way that we do.

Sarah Hyndman (02:40.6)
For the Name That Font game, I didn't have any visual typeface references to look at. I pulled them straight out of my memory. However, if you would like to see a selection of typefaces when you listen to the game, head over to seeingsenses.substack.com.

LJ Rich
I love how this podcast is brainstormed for really interesting and weird, fun things we can do together.

Sarah Hyndman
Now relax, get curious, and let your brain make some unexpected connections because, as LJ says,

LJ Rich
Giving people permission to connect things in an unexpected way can lead to some incredible problem solving.

Sarah Hyndman (03:30.818)
Welcome to Seeing Senses, where we uncover the magic and science behind what makes us feel starting at first sight. This podcast is for creators, small businesses, and the curious.

My guest today is LJ Rich. She's an accomplished, witty and knowledgeable speaker who takes music, tech and AI to the stage to create a live performance instead of a dry keynote talk. She's also a technology reporter who brings us the more weird and experiential multisensory stories. And because of this, LJ Rich, I've been a huge fan of yours for quite a number of years. So welcome. I'm really excited that you're joining me.

LJ Rich
goodness, what an introduction. And also the feeling is mutual. I bought your book, Why Fonts Matter, and because I've always been really sensitive to lettering and words and just, well, generally the world, I think. yes, without sounding too much like a fangirl, this is an amazing and wonderful inevitability that we'd end up talking to each other. I think it's really fun that we're doing this in public.

Sarah Hyndman
Thank you so much. that's going to get so clipped and used. We first got chatting properly when you e-messaged me on LinkedIn and I sat there and went, my goodness, LJ Rich is messaging me. And you messaged to say that you'd just bought my book.

LJ Rich (05:02.516)
And I was heading out to give a talk on synesthesia and typography in Los Angeles. We got chatting and we've been plotting to do some kind of collaboration or to talk about this ever since. And I think maybe this conversation is going to be the beginning of where we start to hatch some plan. hope so. Yay, fantastic. we've got so many overlaps. We're going to come on to synesthesia and AI later on.

Sarah Hyndman (05:27.262)
First of all, I want to set the scene. I'd like to begin with a comment that I read, which I just thought was the most wonderfully empowering statement. You said, after years of trying to fit in, I decided not to. What led you to say that?

LJ Rich
I was giving a talk on stage about the value of diversity in data, I think for want of a better word, this idea that when we look at AI models, a lot of the time what comes out is kind of good enough. It's okay. It's in the middle. It's like pop music. It's, it's all right. But we need to have those beautiful edges, those unconventional people, the unconventional thinking. Having that actually makes a model.

work better. Having these new creative, unconventional thinkers can add a layer of interestingness, if that's a word, to anything. I realised, I think maybe 10, 11 years ago, that the mistake I'd been making was trying to push myself into that middle scenario and was wondering why I wasn't making progress, why I wasn't making connections. And it was simply that I wasn't

confident enough, courageous enough to reach out to the artistic side and allow that to be part of the conversation. So the idea of fitting in or not fitting in really explores this idea of what is neurodiversity anyway, and actually thinking differently can be a superpower.

Sarah Hyndman
I so, so agree with that, that completely resonates. And all of these things are a journey. It takes us a while to work out how to articulate and how to be confident enough to do this. It's even more relevant to the conversations today when we're talking about algorithms flattening and all of us being merged into one kind of homogenous block from everybody I'm talking to and from the experiments I do, the people who come up with the really interesting stories, the outlier answers, those are where.

The shared human stories exist, the things that actually move us, not the stories that sit in the middle.

LJ Rich
This isn't to say that I don't love pop music. I do. I absolutely love all the formulaic music. I, as a human, enjoy patterns and familiarity and I will absorb as much music from as generic a source as you can imagine. I think it's absolutely about including the edges and enjoying the middle. It's like enjoying all of what humanity has to offer. For me, I realized...

that other people didn't have synesthesia, that mixing of the senses that you and I have. And I wanted to ask you actually, what made you realise?

Sarah Hyndman
I don't. I'm so envious. I know what it is. And I have a form of learnt, it would be more cross-modalism than synesthesia, where I've learnt to associate shapes and things that I look at with different sounds and smells. And I've just talked to lots and lots of other people. So no, I wish.

LJ Rich
Are you sure that you don't have a sort of element? Because the way that you write about fonts and typefaces in your book really has this kind of connections in there. And the theory that I have is that all of us are capable of this multimodal thinking and some of us experience it more intensely than others. But there's this sort of slider almost that people have. It's like we say we're feeling blue when we're sad. Why particularly that color or red is associated with feeling angry. So

LJ Rich (08:53.28)
I do feel that perhaps humanity does have this strange connection across senses that maybe it's easy for somebody like me to articulate because it's so intensely there all the time. And perhaps for other people it is there because why else would people resonate with what we're saying when we talk about feeling under the weather, know, that physicality.

Sarah Hyndman
So the metaphors, I find that the whole linguistics of how metaphors actually trigger bits of our brain to understand how we feel. So feeling edgy, an edgy situation, the tactile bits of your brain are going, I know what edgy feels like, which is much, much more activating than the non-

LJ Rich
worried. If you said you're feeling worried, that's a very kind of generic term, isn't it? And I've always, since I was very, very little, loved reading, loved words, loved language. Language is music. It really is. It's just music that's been sort of hardened, perhaps. I think music is my first language, that assembly language for me, which sounds really hipster when I say that. But then with languages, and I'm fascinated by all use of sound.

There is something really beautiful about the fact that we're squeezing and pushing air through some folds and then somebody's ear is receiving these bits of air and turning it into sense in the brain. It's such an improbable thing. And yet here we are.

Sarah Hyndman
that's turning it into electrical impulses that your brain then has to calculate. There's so many layers and it still works. So many of these things are completely invisible. One of my things about typography is everybody keeps saying it's so niche and it's like, no, no, no, it's not. It's just the, don't notice it there. It's there. It's ubiquitous. We interact with it more than we eat every day.

Sarah Hyndman (10:24.344)
take it for granted.

LJ Rich (10:37.676)
And if it's so sort of taken for granted, why on earth are there absolutely tons of advertising agencies, creatives who are really fussy about which typeface or font fits a particular thing? This, I believe it is something that we feel and some of us are able to articulate it with more accuracy. A bit like if an artist looks at a painting, they can say, yes, this has been...

using the rule of thirds very well. There are leading lines here. Somebody else who isn't trained in art would still be able to say, this painting makes me feel good. And they might not know why.

Sarah Hyndman
I think art is a really good comparison. Being given permission to have that conversation, being told you're allowed to, it's not just the academics that are allowed to talk about it. I think art, wine and typography seem to be those things that there are perceived gatekeepers. It's just using different language. So if I asked you to compare typefaces with chocolate, you can do that really easily because you're talking about how it makes you feel. Whereas if I say, what do you think of that typeface? People just go all rabbit in headlights and like,

LJ Rich
yes, I think there's actually very similar aspects of music where it sometimes feels like a gatekeeping type of thing. If you can't read music, then you can't play along. And then the other way around though, that people don't talk about as much, if you're brought up just reading music, then when somebody takes those dots away, then you're really worried about this idea of improvising. It's created this strange artificial barrier between musicians who read music and don't wish to...

explore improvisation and musicians who play by ear and are worried about the learning curve involved in reading music. Now this is a whole nother topic. Music is really difficult to read because it was originally written down as a reminder of a song that you already know. So music notation isn't about learning, it's about remembering, which is why it feels so counterintuitive to try and read music. It was originally based on the hand movements of somebody standing in front of a choir.

LJ Rich (12:37.41)
And it's just complete luck that when the hand was high up, it was a high frequency note. And when the hand was low down, it was a low frequency note. So don't worry if you can't read music. You probably can more than you think because you can recognise if you see a piece of music you know, you can recognise when the melody goes up and when the melody goes down. So you are reading music.

Sarah Hyndman
I have this thing called Typography Karaoke I do where I just put words like hello in different places. And exactly as you're describing, really instinctively, people go, hello, hello, We need to play this. This is part of what our collaboration might be. Yes. The music was written as a reminder. That's amazing. I think that the first recipe books were done in a very similar way.

LJ Rich
Really?

LJ Rich (13:18.167)
A show.

Sarah Hyndman (13:27.82)
So rather than giving you a whole recipe, it was just reminders to cooks of what kind of things that they could put together. So it's really interesting the way these things have since been kind of over intellectualized and turned into prescriptive things that then become barriers, whereas they were just meant to be incredibly instinctive. Yes. You touched a little bit on something. I've had a few of these conversations now and there's one thing that keeps coming up, but people are explaining it very differently through their own experiences. And it's this idea that
us as humans or our human brain makes connections between really weird and disparate things. So you mentioned metaphors before, but I know you've talked about our brains making patterns and I wondered if you could elaborate on that.

LJ Rich
Yes, I believe that making unexpected connections is probably what another person might call inspiration. And I sit here in the midst of a massive creative glut of ideas that I'm currently having after a long time of feeling kind of stuck. yeah, I think part of this

Unexpected Connections is very simple for me, for example, to explain that if I listen to Yellow Submarine by The Beatles, it makes me think of Iced Buns. Something about the tune, something about the way that it moves along. It's not anything crazy or out of the ordinary, but it's just like a nice piece of pastry with nice sugary icing on top. This is an unexpected connection.

when you hear the music and you get something unexpected, in the same way that you might be walking along to catch a train and you notice that you're walking in time with the music you're listening to and you can hear your footsteps in time and then the train arrives in time and you just have this feeling that everything is connected in some way. These unexpected connections are things that we make all the time. I've trained myself almost.

to point them out to other people because for a long time I would have them, for example, in a street where four different cars beat their horn at the same time and it was a B flat major seventh or something. And it's like, yes, this is a beautiful symphony of traffic. That's something that's natural for me to feel. But giving people permission to connect things in an unexpected way can lead to some incredible problem solving.

LJ Rich (15:48.606)
and most innovative moments that people have, they're not this kind of miraculous, sudden lightning strike. They're probably the result of a lot of thinking and a lot of doing something else and letting the brain do its thing in the background. And then that moment of, this is the answer. It's something that comes of your effort and your ability to put in the acceptance of those.

unexpected connections. For me, for example, each key has a particular colour or the clothing that I choose to wear has to have the correct texture. Yes, I cut the labels out of my clothes, like many people who've got that kind of contextual sensitivity. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that we're making unexpected connections all the time, all of us. And sometimes having

the ability to sit with it could be the thing that unsticks you from wherever you're stuck. If it's a work problem, if it's, how do I deal with this person in a way that feels right for both of us? All of these things is based on our brain's ability to put things together in unexpected ways and new ways.

Sarah Hyndman
Having been a graphic designer for many years, this is what creative studios thrive on. Throwing all of these different ideas into the mix and every time you have a new client in a new industry, you'd start asking questions. I find that it's always somewhere like the shower or somewhere quiet, liminal spaces, sitting in coffee shops or sitting on buses. That seems to be where I have all of these ideas, the pattern matching.

LJ Rich
Water is a massive source of inspiration and I get it, liminal spaces, airports, train stations, where you're neither one place or another, you're in flux. I wonder if that gives our brains permission to just sort of wander around somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Sarah Hyndman (17:30.924)
It feels like it does with mine completely. And I love it. just put me on a plane with no internet and I'm just happy. You can put me on a direct flight to Australia and that's a really happy place because I'm going to fill a sketchbook with ideas.

LJ Rich
You know, I've actually got playlists for different aircraft models because for example, the A350, the engines point in a slightly different direction and it has an effect on the resonant frequency of the cabin. Yes. So I have a certain level of affection for aircraft and mass transit and have many recordings of PD sounds from metros around the world. They're saying this out loud.

really aware now that maybe that's the way that I'm not a conventional human.

That's no, no, no.

Sarah Hyndman
I also have at least one friend who will be sitting there going, yes, getting really excited. My sound designer friend. wow. He have a running playlist that's the cadence of my stride, but you're taking that to like the nth degree of matching playlists to airplane sounds.

LJ Rich (18:34.914)
Well yes, for example in London the central line is in F major.

Sarah Hyndman
my goodness. need, wow. I want to see through your eyes. You've got wonderful talks on, on YouTube. I love the way you bring live performances to the audience, but you make it really immersive. You never just talk at people. You bring them into your world. There was one where you showed a visual 3D color mapping of how you see sound. I'd come up with this phrase somewhere that your brain can literally smell the color of sound. thought that seemed quite...

LJ Rich
I love that. I love that idea. It's such a strange and wonderful concept. I do see it as tasting as much as smelling or seeing, but it was my attempt to represent graphically what happens when I hear music. I know my brain does something strange because I was doing some filming with Professor Eduardo Miranda from I think it's the University of Exeter who asked me to wear a brain cap and stare at some patterns on a screen.

And that would generate signals from my visual cortex in the back of my head that would then display a particular piece of music for a cello player to play. And everything was going absolutely fine until the cello player started playing music. And then my brain did something really odd. All the noise disappeared from it. And they had to recalibrate the machine because it was a really unexpected thing that my brain was doing. With that, I can explain now how I see music is.

You could play me a song and all of the notes would split out into different colour shapes against a big grid of time. So if you use a music sequence, you might have seen those grids where you can see blocks of colour that represent the notes. But in my case, it's 3D, so it's going forward. It's like a massive IMAX screen. And there's also information on what type of note it is. So the timbre of the note, so is it a...

LJ Rich (20:28.078)
woodwind, is it a string, is it a synth, you know, and then it's not time signature dependent and it's not chromatic, Western chromatic, there is space for it to be in other scales, but I can reach out and move this grid around and query the notes and I'm moving my hands around whilst we're chatting. So I can rewind and I can go in and look at different notes. The upshot of this is I can hear something and play it on the piano fully orchestrated.

or I can reproduce something fully orchestrated. The pitch and the rhythm is not a mystery. It's beautiful.

Describing it, I actually find so much more evocative because it's taking me further into this idea that you're inside it, you're not looking at it. I heard you say somewhere else that you can remember every piece of music you've ever heard.

Yes, and I believe that the synesthesia aspect of pattern recognition and memory is something that perhaps more of us can access than we think. So during lockdown, I learned how to solve the Rubik's Cube and the way that you solve it, it's actually easier than you think it is once you understand it. You're not solving one side at a time. You're solving it in layers, the bottom, the middle, the top layer. I developed a musical way to remember how to do certain moves.

For example, you would see one cube bit in one place and you'd need to move it to the other. And you would recognise a state on the cube and you would have to follow five moves that you've learned to move that small piece to the other side, if that makes sense. And instead of trying to remember it as notation or remembering it as do these steps, I had just assigned a note to each movement. And so I would go, la, la, la, la, la.

LJ Rich (22:11.158)
la la la and those would be the moves that I would do with my hand. So love would be move my right hand forward. Love would be my left hand. So it's it sounds insanely complicated doing this in an audio format. But I did put this up online as a method of solving and the Rubik's Cube people actually

responded and said, this is actually very clever. so, yes, I believe we do have ways of using music to remember things. We've got mnemonics, we've got access to songs and sound are a brilliant way to help us remember things.

Sarah Hyndman
You've just made me realise that, so I have a boxing coach and when she teaches me sequences, all of my friends, I always have to say, no, I need to learn the pattern. And it's because I'm hearing the pattern as music. hadn't ever, ever clocked that before. That's brilliant.

Yes, of course.

LJ Rich (23:11.246)
have you been doing boxing for? That's a really awesome hobby.

Sarah Hyndman
I started kickboxing about 13 years ago. So proper grownup, I was like the old person in the room doing kickboxing. I prefer kickboxing to boxing. Kick. Yes, I like how you're demonstrating this in your chair.

LJ Rich (23:28.056)
That's the of balance that you must have. I love watching people do that.

Sarah Hyndman
but doing it yourself is better than watching. Just, it's just fun. And I think for any of us who have brains that chat a lot, you have to concentrate so much that when you get into the flow of just doing a few sequences, it quietens your brain just for a few minutes. And that's the most peaceful, beautiful thing ever. You're talking about having the brain cap put on. One of my questions was going to be, have you ever been scanned in an FMRI machine? Because.

LJ Rich
Yes, flow state.

Sarah Hyndman (24:00.13)
just so intriguing. There's studies that I think are absolutely fascinating where things like the word cinnamon, if you already know what cinnamon smells like, and especially if you cue your brain in to say, smell this or even don't smell this, those olfactory area of your brains now will be lighting up going, yes, cinnamon, I can smell that. If you imagine different things, I would imagine different areas of your brain must be lighting up.

LJ Rich
I would love to have an fMRI whilst talking about or playing the piano or doing, I guess, a keyboard. It might be quite hard to wheel a piano into an MRI room. But yes, I would absolutely love my brain to be scanned whilst doing something creative. There's something quite hypnotic and weirdly reassuring about the sound of an MRI machine. I've had a few done because I had some health issues that I am now no longer having to worry about so much. But the...

rhythmic sound of an MRI machine, I, every time I go in think that I should write a rave track to go with it so that people would listen to it. And then I realized this is a terrible idea because the one thing you need to not do inside an MRI machine is move. But for me, the rave music is in there alongside the mm mm mm mm mm mm mm mm mm mm mm mm mm mm

physically trying to remain as still as possible whilst the rest of my body is going, you want to dance to the MRI machine.

And those bits of your brain, the dancey bits, I'm sure they're all kind of lighting up as well. So this is a call for anybody listening who might actually have access to an MRI. Because you wouldn't even actually need a keyboard, they'd all just have to ask you to imagine playing a keyboard. Because I would imagine that you would be able to do that just on your legs.

Or can we come and, okay, somebody listening who can do this, there'll be somebody. Can I come along and record it as well, my god, exciting, exciting stuff.

Yes.

LJ Rich (25:57.038)
podcast is just turning into a brainstorm for really interesting and weird fun things we can do together.

Sarah Hyndman
There's been, yes, I think that's just an excuse really, this podcast to do things like this. I was reading about a cinema of New Zealand that does scented cinema with scratch and sniff cards and they put Nosferatu on recently.

LJ Rich
What does that smell like?

Sarah Hyndman
I have no idea, but this was going to be one of my questions. What if what they thought it smelled like completely mismatches with what you think it does? How does it work when things, when the stimuli don't match up for you?

LJ Rich
What a great question. I should preface this with a few years ago, I actually did a guest lecture at Harvard involving a multi-sensory symphony where I played music and performed. And at the same time, I had some people go out into the audience and waft various scents. One movement was coffee. And so there was coffee around and for people who wanted to drink some coffee, they could drink some at the same time. And another movement was forest. So we had pine and eucalyptus and people.

LJ Rich (27:03.042)
blowing fans around just as a performance that took in those other aspects of sound and smell and all of that kind of thing. It was very, very odd and arty and cool and weird. And yes, we made sure nobody was allergic to anything before we unleashed all of these different senses, sensory stimuli on. But yeah, mean, most of the time things clash and I've learned to deal with it. So for example, going to a

a beautiful restaurant where the food is delicious, but the wallpaper is wrong or the soundtrack isn't matching. don't know. Weirdly, things go that you wouldn't expect to go. listening to easy listening music and eating mashed potato is brilliant. Listening to say Bach and drinking green tea is fantastic. If you are in a restaurant that's serving spicy food, but the wallpaper is strangely geometric, that doesn't work.

Geometric flopper.

Yes. Well, I don't mind if it's paisley and curved, like with fleur de lis type, like that kind of thing has a particular taste profile for me. So patterns and things like that. I think, and that's probably one of the reasons that I'm able to do this sort of technology trend forecasting in a way is that this is about human receptive slash transmitting that human behavior and how we respond to stimulus. And that can also include

technology and how we interact with that and what we do when we're presented with these sort of incongruous things. How do people think their future is going to be with something like AI or technology and how that works? So on the one hand, I'm aware that what I'm saying sounds really esoteric and strangely surreal, but actually being able to say, hang on, this wallpaper's patterning is having an effect on my experience of eating this particular food. That's going to be very similar to

LJ Rich (28:59.95)
how I interact with say a technology such as social media and my response to seeing repeated patterns there is going to change what my outlook is, which is why I'm very careful to curate any social media that I partake in. I'm aware that at the same time though, I've got the opportunity to train back. I'm still being trained at the same time. And this is the same if I'm

working with chat GPT, if I am absorbing something from a social media network, or if I'm even reading a newsletter or a book, it's being aware that whilst I'm being trained, especially if it's a two way mechanism, I have the opportunity to train things back as well.

Sarah Hyndman
That feels really empowering in a world where we sometimes feel like we don't have that much control over it, where the algorithm is maybe controlling us a little bit too much. the fact that you can be a part of this and play a more proactive role. You just touched on tech and trends. there any, especially thinking about sites and senses that you think have been particularly interesting?

LJ Rich
There's always been a bunch of things. Once we sorted out the visual aspect of interactivity, when I was chatting to a few people from Framestore who do all the special effects and Oscar winning movies, they were saying that real life is around 90, 95 frames a second of still images. And once technology gets good enough to deliver 90, 95 frames a second, which it kind of is, that we are going to find it very difficult to determine what's real and what isn't. Anyone that's spent time

inside a virtual reality environment will know that it feels much more real than we think. If we're put in a virtual high place, our bodies respond as if we are standing on top of a building, even if the imagery is blocky, even if it's not as detailed as real life. So humans are very easily impressed and they're very easily fooled. What I'm really fascinated by are the AIs where you're chatting in real time.

LJ Rich (31:02.668)
in real time audio. Some of these are beginning to get very close to passing the Turing test, which is whether you can tell something is, is human or AI. Now I've been working with generative AI for probably going seven or eight years now, which is a very long time considering where people are when chat GPT jumped into the world's consciousness. Two or three years ago, I was on the beta for that. And I've been on the beta for many of this sort of generative AI musical stuff. I've, I've worked with that.

because that was about two years ago.

LJ Rich (31:32.044)
technology and watching how it's evolved to speak with humans as if it understands. And that's, that's the nub really. It doesn't understand it's, it's a word calculator. It's putting together words that make sense based on the most probable next step in a sequence. What I'm very excited about, and I've actually been giving talks in schools about this, just because I think it's a really fun thing for children to think about is the idea.

of learning how we can impact the world back, if that makes sense. I feel that's going to be the next trend where we start to understand our role in training this technology. The data that's currently being used to train these AIs consists of stuff that's been given to the internet, stuff that's been put out there, mainly text. But what happens when we start integrating?

audio in, folk stories, people just chatting, having normal conversations. Will that then mean that some of the rhetoric that's coming out doesn't get counted as normal? And instead we have these conversational training where people are just having random conversations. nice day, isn't it? Or what are you having for dinner? I'll have this please. And that normal aspect, I say normal, what is normal? The conversations...

that lot of these things are trained on are from the extremes of the internet. And therefore it's unsurprising that the outputs will skew towards extremes. They're moderated somewhat, but there is a massive gap of data that these things haven't been trained on yet. And that's next. And when that happens, I feel like that will be the golden age.

Sarah Hyndman
I find that exciting. The idea that it becomes broader and richer and more human.

LJ Rich (33:16.472)
Yes, more empathic, if that's a word, or did they make that up in Star Trek The Next Generation? Empathy and being able to hold two conflicting views at the same time and still have the ability to accept another person's point of view. mean, it's a big difference. Accepting another person's point of view is very different from accepting some hate speech. And I feel like I need to be quite careful here when we're talking about this, because as part of my...

role working for the AI for Good United Nations global summit on AI every year. One of the things that we're looking at is how AI can be used for good things that are good for humanity. And that's not just talking about chatbots and how we're interacting with those. It's things like you can use AI to monitor climate and you can use AI to mix nutrients at the bottom of the ocean so that more sea life can get fed. There's so many amazing ways to use AI.

I feel like I want to move it forward from that old sense of AI being evil. It's not, it's just technology that's been given an input and is giving an output and people are at the end of all of this technology. We are either end of it. So we humans, we are responsible for helping AI be good. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

conversations are either in complete denial, like most half the designers are like, no, it'll never affect my job for dystopia denial to dystopia, which somebody else said would be a really great book title somewhere. yes. In that death metal type. Love it. You're making me really aware of the connections I make that because they're not really extreme. I couldn't call myself a synesthete because I'm not a proper one, but I make enough of these connections.

or a band name.

Sarah Hyndman (35:04.748)
What you're talking about, the oral stories, it's a thing. I've been finding it with questions I'm going to come onto at the end, how objects or talisman pull out stories that people tell. My dad grew up in Northern Ireland and my friends bought some potato bread back and the label said Hindman and Sons, because my dad's dad had set this up. He rang me up when he saw the photo and spent an hour just telling me stories of being a teenager. And these were not things that he would ever have written down.

Oral culture is a thing that has been missed out of the last 500 years, the whole Gutenberg parenthesis idea that print stabilized a certain kind of discourse, that we're on the cusp of the next is really exciting.

LJ Rich
There's something called the Listening Project, which is this beautiful collection of audio that a story is being told by people. But yes, I completely agree that more is better. And I think that that would just round out a lot of these models. And thinking of AI as a companion and not a replacement is a very powerful way to start integrating it. It's here. The technology is not something that can be stopped.

What we can do is adapt our behavior towards it. And I say this when I'm giving keynotes to these massive organizations and world leaders. say, look, if you're employing AI to replace people, you are going to be in a race to the bottom. You're going to commoditize the wrong thing. Really AI has a space to lift and support people. It shouldn't be the case where someone has to work three different jobs to support a family. Perhaps there's something that we can change about society and maybe AI is the thing.

that can help us do that.

Sarah Hyndman (36:41.902)
I like the way you talk about in your keynotes about how AI is this collaborator, the idea of it being an agent, but you use it very much on stage as a collaborator and credit it, which I think is great as well in a way that makes sense that you would do that. Before I get onto the universal questions that I've been asking everybody.

I just wanted to come back to our idea that we might do. My thing is typography, but very much framed through the experiential lens of our senses and our emotions, which when I first started doing this, hardly anybody was doing, as opposed to the chin stroking academic debates over terminology and kerning and the designer side of things, which of course is very niche. There's always has to be lots of chin stroking when you talk

LJ Rich
Yeah. Okay. Carry on, carry on. Cause I'm really excited about this next bit. Yeah.

Sarah Hyndman
You are typeface sensitive and just how you experience this and how can we, how can we put this into a collaboration and turn it into something? So you hear, you see, how does it work for you?

LJ Rich
So I've always been unbelievably sensitive to fonts typefaces. There's something about them that evoke real feelings.

LJ Rich (37:53.454)
So what I've done is I've used AI to help create some musical versions of well-known typefaces and fonts that I'm going to play to you. One or two of them, I couldn't get AI to do so I had to compose it myself, but that's okay. So what would you like me to do? Would you like me to play you?

Sarah Hyndman
Are you going to make me guess the font?

LJ Rich
don't think that's fair because this is my version of it and I don't want you to feel like you're getting something wrong.

Sarah Hyndman
I mean, I don't mind being put on the spot because I understand that the caveat is I won't necessarily hear it. I'm quite intrigued to see how closely I could guess.

LJ Rich
All right. I'll you what, I'll play you a few and then we can maybe do some guessing as well. All right. So the first one I'm to play you is Times New Roman. And what does Times New Roman evoke for you?

Sarah Hyndman (38:48.854)
Okay, so Times New Roman, it's standard typeface on Microsoft Word. So I'm getting so excited, I can't talk. It's a very traditional, slightly old fashioned looking typeface that you'd associate with knowledge and dictionaries.

LJ Rich (39:13.166)
So this is Time's New Roman.

That works for me! A little bit of inspiration. You've just made Times New Roman sexy!

knowledgeable, dependable.

LJ Rich (39:34.145)
Okay, that was a good-

LJ Rich (39:38.767)
Somebody had to. Okay, right, let's do the next one now. Alright, so could you describe for me Helvetica?

That's brilliant!

Sarah Hyndman (39:47.512)
Helvetica was designed to be neutral, invisible, just to be carriers of information, and it's everywhere.

Okay.

you

LJ Rich (40:11.576)
This one is sort of inoffensive. You can hear it everywhere and not be annoyed.

you

Sarah Hyndman (40:18.574)
I it's got the hopefulness of its Swiss origins. also feel that being a little bit of mountain air and sunshine.

Okay. All right. So I'm going to do one for you to guess now.

you

Sarah Hyndman (40:51.384)
go with.
and has really big round.
or Eurostyle which is kind of quite spacey no Futura! it's Futura! my god did I get it right? yes! Futura! which is kind of the love child of the ones I've started explaining

This is Futura!

LJ Rich (41:19.682)
This is amazing!

That actually literally does sound like Futura. my goodness.

This is fun, isn't it? I've got a few more. Have we got time?

Yeah, I've got as long as you have. okay.

This is going to be like a four hour podcast. All right. I'm going to do this one. It feels like it could be two.

LJ Rich (41:40.898)
Would you like to guess or would you like to explain what this might be?

Sarah Hyndman
Yes, let me guess.

Sarah Hyndman (42:02.805)
Oh, I want to go with something like...

Cooper Black or something quite sassy. Is it Cooper Black? It's Cooper Black!

LJ Rich (42:21.838)
Goodness, you! That's... This is...

So, okay.

I don't think I could even articulate why that works.

LJ Rich
It's a sort of comedy late night talk show, stand up comedy feel. Would you like one more? This is a show on its own, it? think it really is. Put Sarah on the spot and say, what font does this sound like? Okay. I'm, I think this might be quite a difficult one. So all guesses are okay.

Yes, please.

Sarah Hyndman (42:58.734)
My random guess is there's a typeface called Bodoni Poster Italic.

kind of chunky and laid back and quite...

LJ Rich
Yeah, it's pretty much there, it's Clarendon. So it's a sort of Bodoni and Clarendon on that.

you

Sarah Hyndman (43:27.246)
so Clarendon is kind of the chunkier

LJ Rich
You've got the chunkiness of a hipster, which is...

Sarah Hyndman
I was just making it a more curvy because this feels more curvy to me. Clarendon has got really blocky. So Clarendon would be a bit harsher for me. I love this game so much.

LJ Rich
You'd like it. Well, I cannot believe that you guessed Futura. I cannot believe that you, you're like, yeah, it's this and, just, Cooper Black, that was the one that I was really, I thought you're either going to get it or you're going to go, we're not recording this bit.

Sarah Hyndman
All credit to how you've thought about how you can convert a font into sound.

LJ Rich (44:10.552)
And I'm using AI to do it because then I can iterate it and keep trying until it feels like it works. I'm a big fan of being very transparent about my work with AI. I think it's important to label things as synthetic, label things as AI generated. It just makes it a lot easier for people to understand what's real and what isn't.

the process, it's a collaboration. You didn't just tell it to do this, you put lots of prompts in and you've worked and worked and worked on it until it came out as that. Gosh, my mind is still just going, my god, is so, imagine doing this on a stage in front of 3000 people, but them guessing as well first, before.

Yes, they can vote on an app, for example. And we could even do it as a description without explaining what it's called. So they've got five points for guessing after the music and three points for guessing after the description. And then one point for guessing when it's actually on a screen.

I'll name that tune in. Yes, yeah. name that font in.

And then of course, if you get it wrong then, what are you doing at a show about fonts?

Sarah Hyndman (45:11.898)
I could talk about this for hours longer.

LJ Rich
my gosh, that's so fun. This is why I don't book anything after doing interviews with cool people.

Sarah Hyndman
here right back at you.

I have two questions that I'm asking everybody and it's really interesting to hear and compare all of their answers. The first one, did you, LJ Rich, pick shudder or disappointment?

LJ Rich
Shudder every time. It's much more interesting. Spelling errors, they're involuntary shudder. And even though I'm very close friends with many dyslexic people, I've learned how to train myself out of the visible shuddering. Organic things with lots of holes in.

Sarah Hyndman (45:50.542)
Amazing how many people are saying that!

LJ Rich
The trypophobia is strong with us. But like many years on live TV means that I've largely trained myself out of making those sort of large physical movements. for example, I have a TV sneeze. When I sneeze, I can just go like that.

Sarah Hyndman
especially if you're mic'd up and you know you're going to deafen all the sound people.

LJ Rich
There's a slightly weirder one which you're welcome to include or not, but I should mention a slight content warning which is during my chemotherapy, the different IV drugs that I would be given would have different physiological and visual synesthesia responses. One of the chemotherapy drugs was silver when it went in and cold and another one was this very strange bright blue. I should add that's not the actual colour. The colour of the

The IV bag was clear, but the colours in my head would be very sort of stark. So that's a very odd, uncomfortable feeling. But at the same time, the knowledge that the chemicals going in were designed to help was something that I was able to hold on to. I've largely trained myself out of shuddering, but I do have big responses to things still.

Sarah Hyndman (47:04.578)
The colours were quite calming colours.

LJ Rich
Maybe a sort of jagged, silvery, sort of metallic, weird river of lava. And then the blue one was this very strange fluorescent, like someone had spilled a fluorescent pen on the table. It was very odd. And I wrote a lot of it down, which helped me process. It's a big thing to go on a treatment pathway like that. And I'm sure people listening would have have or known somebody affected by it. And I hope that by talking about this sort of thing openly, that it helps one person.

to realise that they're not alone.

Sarah Hyndman
Thank you. That's a really important message and I will keep that in for that very reason. Tell me about an item that when you look at it evokes either happy sense associations or happy sense memories for you.

LJ Rich
Apart from the very obvious, which is loud speakers and massive lights in a line by a stage and that wonderful feeling when you're on a stage and you're seeing other people and everybody's engaged and in flow. That feeling when, the risk of sounding full of myself, I received a standing ovation after a musical performance I gave at a really important event at the United Nations, which previous to that, I was standing behind the stage very, very worried. And that...

LJ Rich (48:21.324)
that feeling of looking at people, looking at you, and you're looking at them, and there's this sense that you've all been together for something amazing. That's incredible. But in terms of like a product, packaging, an object, new books, science fiction books, a delicious mango being cut up in a hot country, pomegranates being opened by professionals, watching people do art, painting, writing, physical art, circuses, acrobatics, performances.

airplanes, trains, that beautiful rhythmic sound of going through and seeing the landscape on a train window transition from one type of thing to another. Somebody bringing you something with a pot that they lift the lid off for you to eat and the smell that assaults your body. Hot tubs, cold tubs, swimming somewhere hot, swimming somewhere cold. Everything, the world is there for us to enjoy and feel fully.

Sarah Hyndman
Okay, I'm now giving you a standing ovation. That's the thing. That's your single.

LJ Rich
I would put that to music.

Sarah Hyndman
absolutely beautiful. I was having so many yes yes yes and yeah and the memories it was evoking in me as well so thank you that's beautiful. What one thing about sight and senses would you like the listeners to take away from this conversation we've talked about so much?

LJ Rich (49:26.126)
Wow.

LJ Rich (49:36.11)
have, it's a lovely thing to ask. I mean, we are all different and amazing and we have more in common with each other than we think. And I've learned to treat those extra feelings that I have and acknowledge them and realise that other people have extra feelings as well. And knowing that we are all capable of feeling things deeply, it helps me feel more courageous. And I want to look after that part of everyone that's creative and unconventional. And I want to give everyone.

listening, permission to find their inspiration and follow their path with care and acceptance and joy.

Sarah Hyndman
Thank you. I think that's all I need to finish with is just thank you. You have been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much. We've gone through a whole journey from discussing difficult things, challenging me and ending up with a really beautiful message. It's been such a pleasure to have you join us.

LJ Rich
Lovely. Thank you. I hope some of it's made sense.

Sarah Hyndman (50:44.844)
Would you like updates, extras, sense hacking experiments and book recommendations from the guests? Head over to seeingsenses.substack.com You can also become a paid subscriber to support the making of this podcast and belong to the Inner Circle. I'll take you beneath the surface to explore what's happening inside our brain and body, along with updates on the latest in cross-disciplinary science.

I'm Sarah Hyndman. I'm a designer, researcher, author and speaker. You can book me to bring my Seeing Senses activity lab or as a speaker to your conference or event.

Thank you for listening to the Seeing Senses podcast.