On The Cutting Edge

Jory with his crazy train hard hat

Train Timetable

When Jory asked questions about how things worked, Sam was great at explaining them to him in great detail.  When Dad was away on travel for work, we looked things up in books.  It became a habit to find just the right books to answer his many questions.  He was interested in everything and needed to know what made them work.  He loved trains and had a book of timetables.  He could tell anyone who asked, when the Amtrak train was going from San Diego to Los Angeles through Fullerton.  If someone wanted to go to Albuquerque, he could plan the best route for him or her via rail.  When he decided to teach himself to play guitar, I handed him a book of chords and he figured them out.  When I wanted to learn Photoshop, he installed it on my computer and handed me a book, saying I could call him when I ran into problems.

Much of Jory's knowledge base was self-taught.  Curiosity sparked his diving into books, followed by processing what he had read with critical thinking.  Thoughts of how this new information could be applied in different ways preceded trial and error experimentation.  He always wanted to be on the cutting edge with new ideas and ways of doing things.  He loved the challenge.

Putting up the wallboard in the dead room

Jory’s biggest dream was to have his own recording studio, so he decided to build one with help from his friends and Fairfax neighbors.  Of course, it couldn’t be just a regular recording studio, it had to have perfect acoustics to satisfy Jory’s gift of acute hearing and perfect pitch.  Its largest space was a “dead room” with neutral sound, meaning it could have no reverberations or extra sounds like echos, buzzes from the air conditioner, or outside noises from the adjacent baseball field.  It was built as a floating room within a larger room, with 3-foot-wide sound buffering space between the walls.   

Jory in the dead room

He enlisted his friend Tony Grimani, an expert in acoustics, co-developer of THX, and a colleague from Lucas (SkyWalker Sound) days, to design and tune the room. They selected wooden floors, strong attenuation sound panels to absorb high frequencies, and acoustic diffusers to treat distortions.  Studio.jory.org earned the reputation of being the best sounding independent recording space in the San Francisco Bay Area, producing outstanding spatial rendition, smooth bass, and excellent dialog clarity.

Jory’s personal domain was really in the adjacent control room where he recorded music, dialogue, and sound effects, followed by masterfully mixing them into the final product.  He equipped his room with a 128 channel recording and mixing capability.  Speakers surrounded the recording engineer with the same surround sound technology used in movie theaters.  About that time, video games were emerging as a major player in the entertainment industry.  

Jory in the control room

In general, Jory was frustrated by the poor sound quality of video games.  He decided that adding more realistic sound effects to video games, enhanced by surround sound, would greatly increase the users’ enjoyment, and lead to more game sales.  He faced several obstacles, starting with the devices on which the games were played, for they were not equipped with multi-level sound output.  He became the solo sound guy on several professional committees of acoustic engineers developing the new standards for sound in computer driven electronics.  He confidently went to Apple and Microsoft to gain their support.  

Jory with award for best dialogue for
The Walking Dead Video Game

Game developers were converting the stories originally written for movies and TV into video games.  While he championed the use of improved sound in video games, Jory also pleaded with the game developers to hire professional voice actors.   He had began directing and recording dialogue for Telltale Games, a new company started by former Lucas Arts employees, like himself.  He had a talent for knowing what the character should sound like and finding just the right actor to represent it.  He was enthusiastic, proactive, and tenacious, becoming the change agent for realistic, authentic sound and dialogue in video games.  One concrete result was that Jory and his dialogue production team were nominated nine times for "Best Voice Acting" Aggie Awards and won three times.  In addition, he also won multiple awards from the Game Audio Network Guild and the Norwegian Game Awards.  The bonus for the game developers was that his games sold well.

Bardeen, Shockley, & Brittain, co-inventors of the transistor,
which is often considered Bell Labs' greatest innovation. 1948

One of Jory's video game clients had a game that required the sound of a doorbell.  Most likely, any doorbell sound would have been passable, but Jory always strived for perfection and authenticity.  Since his teenage years, he had been fascinated with telephony and again began to wonder about why doorbells and phones had their particular rings.  He began extensive research on the subject, leading him to the archives at the University of California Berkeley, where copies of all the research papers from Bell Labs are stored.  For hours and weeks, he hibernated in the Berkeley library reading the complex, intricate, documentation and learning all about the science and engineering behind telephony.    

“Dad,” he called home with excitement, “you can't imagine how interesting this is.  The Bell Labs research starting from the 1920's and '30's is amazing and I'm learning so much.  People just aren't aware of how innovative and far reaching Bell Labs’ work has been.  I've been invited to speak to a couple of groups at Berkeley and I'm going to apply to do a TED Talk on the Bell Labs papers.”  Jory’s enthusiasm was contagious.

Rabbi Joseph Smith sharing a pun with Jory at his Bar Mitzvah

Written by James Joyce
 and published in 1939

In his spare time, Jory took on James Joyce by reading Finnegan’s Wake.  Joyce is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century, so Jory decided that he had much to learn from him.  His first challenge was the vocabulary.  It is written in a peculiar and obscure English, further complicated by its use of complex multi-level puns.  Jory had come to love puns when he was studying for his Bar Mitzvah with Rabbi Joseph Smith, whom Jory referred to as “The Pun Master.”  As he read Finnegan’s Wake, he added a new element to his internet website:  Word Of The Day.  Every day Jory posted a new word and it's definition, from what he had learned from reading Joyce.  His ulterior motive was to increase his vocabulary to apply to his daily subscription of the New York Times Crossword Puzzles or word games like Scrabble.

Jory first went to Norway as a tourist.  He fell in love with the fresh air and blue skies, mountains resplendent with waterfalls, and efficient public transportation.  He bonded with the Norwegian video game developers and found that he could help them grow to a world-class industry, as well as bring in new clients to studio.jory.org.  He began spending more and more time in Norway:  working, making friends, and exploring the country. 

Norway’s public transportation system attracted him like a magnet.  It's convenient, cost efficient, and reliable, all very important to Jory.  Best of all, was that he could access all the train, bus, and ferry schedules and buy his tickets on the internet.  For fun, he would plan trips all over the country using online train timetables.  He also found that information on museums and their contents were online.  It was a tourist’s goldmine that needed to be shared.

Highlights of Norway for Tourists

Jory, always a techie at heart, decided to develop an avant-garde tourist guide of Norway.  He included everything that a tourist needed to know to be his own educated and efficient tour guide.  He compiled maps of cities and the countryside; menus of museums, which included locations, hours of operation, transportation options, and virtual online tours where tourists could see the museum offerings, learn ahead of time the history and backgrounds of what they would see, and even purchase online admission tickets.  He had a section for online train, bus, waterways, and air schedules to get tourists where they wanted to go, including the online purchase of tickets for travel and entrance to most venues.  He was also planning to include a section for locating good places to eat.  All of this would be totally accessible on a mobile phone and/or tablet that tourists would bring with them.  He was just about to publish his online tourist guide when his life was cut short, but he did write "Thawing Streams of Consciousness," printed below, describing the magnificent train ride from Bodø to Trondheim.

When Fairfax resident, Michael Leifer, came to Jory with a fantastic idea to write ecology textbooks for middle school students in California, Jory jumped right in.  Michael had dropped into Jory's studio to tell him about the project he shared with a group of ecology-minded dads who had kids in middle school.  Jory was a bright student in school, but often complained that textbooks were dull and boring.  Seeing this opportunity to improve education for others, as well as be on the cutting edge of something new and exciting, Jory became equally excited about Michael’s idea to create iBooks for iPads.  He volunteered to be on the team.

Michael wrote the texts, and Jory breathed technology into them by infusing interactive opportunities for readers.  For example, to enable the students to learn first hand about the movement of tides, Jory provided a button on the iPad that accessed the camera on top of the Golden Gate Bridge.  Instantly, by clicking on the button, students could see the tides flowing below the bridge in real time.  Throughout the books, technology piqued their interest and made learning a more interactive and exciting experience.  Jory is listed as co-author on all four books that he and Michael created.  Energy and Material Resources and Made From Earth, are currently available for download with iBooks on Apple iTunes.

“Amazing books!” extolled Michael.  “Teachers and students have been loving them.”

COMMENTS:  

Click on Jorysmother@gmail.com to send comments.

Jory Prum   February 1, 2009

In my immediate vicinity right now are: a MacBook Pro, 2 Mac Minis, 2 Apple TVs, and a slew and hard drives, keyboards, mice, networking equipment, and other techy things. And I'm at HOME. The studio has at least twice as much geekery going on!

Jory Prum  May 13, 2009  "Thawing Streams of Consciousness"

More great views from the train. There really are no words to describe the view during the train ride from Bodø to Trondheim. Just like the weather in Norway, if you don't like the view (an impossibility at best), just wait 3 minutes and it'll change completely. The problem is that this journey is every bit an emotional experience as it is a visual one. I could take ten thousand photographs with the best camera and I still couldn't convey what I'm seeing pass by. Posting twelve hours of video shot from both my window and the right-hand side of the train wouldn't provide you with anything as remotely meaningful as making this trip yourself.

At the moment (two hours into the 10-and-a-half-hour trip), we're just south of Lønsdal, high in the mountains, with unmarred snow fields extending up the mountain- and hill-sides until they seemlessly meet the sky. Portions of the lakes and streams are still frozen, although the enormous waterfalls we've already encountered (sometimes from just twenty feet away) remind us that the Spring thaw is well under way.

Not everything is snow-covered, though. There are patches of brown grasses, sometimes in large swaths, which help show the contours of the gently-rolling hills that have come to overtake the view in the past three minutes.

Without warning, the hilly sections are gone and the landscape to the left of the train extends gently upward, still joining with the sky at some undiscernable horizon. It's like sitting at the very top of the world, where there can be nothing higher than us; as if the clouds, in their completely untextured mass, are within hands' reach and might be solid, much like the ceiling of my hobbit hole or sitting in the very top seats of the bleachers at a basketball arena.

Suddenly there's a small building. Who comes up here? It doesn't look like anyone is ever in this part of the world, apart from those of us watching the unreal display through the carriage windows.

Another building, this one bigger and more like a visitor's center. And a bridge with no visible road on either side, completely blanketed by snow.

Lacking fanfare, a moment later we pass a small obelisk made of stones the size of footballs and supporting a wire-frame globe at its acme. It looks like a small rendition a much larger marker that was visible at 7:06am from the Hurtigruten yesterday morning. I check the atlas I purchased from a used book shop in Trondheim and sure enough, we've just descended below the Arctic Circle. I feel a moment of sadness that the Arctic portion of my adventures has ended already, a mere 40 hours later.

No time to dwell, though. In the time it took me to grab the atlas (a total of 30-45 seconds), the landscape has changed yet again. There are now scores of deciduous trees along the snowy, mountainous hillside we're gliding along. The clouds have become shapely once more and the snow, while still patchy, has a different texture to it.

The landscape continues to morph. Just ahead is an enormous mountain, its peak obscured by clouds in the way my imagination tells me the Alps probably look. The leaf-less trees are becoming denser, competing with the brown patches to make the hillside look less snowy. But they lose out where the treeline limits them and only the most vertical slopes remain anything but white.

Yet again the surroundings have evolved. Beginning with a high, unseeable peak, pure white gives way to trees, which in turn gives way to earth and dark brown grasses. The bottom of the valley we are following is completely free of snow.

We enter a tunnel. That act in itself often means that what was visible just moments ago is likely only a fresh memory, soon to be replaced by a new, equally awe-inspiring view.

This time, however, we come back to the same scene, continuing down the valley, with tall, skinny trees being replaced by evergreens.

Which morphs again into a mountain community near the tracks, where houses of burnt umber and deep reds, built with exquisite craftmanship and detail, are the norm.

And so it goes.

Jory Prum March 2015  "beep"

I do surround in here (studio.jory.org) so I was able to play around with the 5.1 output in HTML5 audio, which is pretty cool.  There's just really cool things you can do with it.

When they (Game Developers) just let me have free reign, it's kind of fun because I can make things and just go, "Oh, I think it sounds like this," and more often than not, if they sit with it for, you know, for a week or so they can't imagine it sounding like anything else ever again, which is great. So it's fun.

Michael Leifer  April 24, 2016

Many of you knew the enthusiast smiling and witty Jory as an artist, humorist, producer, audio editor, musician, and much more, but you may not know that he was a driven environmentalist, obsessed with Education and wanted to make it much better by making it more experiential. He also believed that climate change was real based on all the NASA and NOAH data, and felt that future generations and teachers needed to have better ecological literacy options within their classrooms. Based on the success of our work on these initial iBooks, Jory was interested in creating and launching a company focused on digital textbooks to be called "Touchable Books"!   Anyway....thought you all should know about the amazing environmental ecological literacy work Jory Prum helped to inspire and create. I’m honored and really proud to have collaborated with him and really miss him, especially his laugh

Molly Presser 

Jory definitely inherited your talent for writing.  Thanks for sharing all of his wisdom in addition to his beautiful descriptions of Norway, the country he fell in love with.  Love reading all you write. Wish I could talk to him and tell him how wonderful he is.  Since I can't do that, I'm telling you and Sam about your wonderful son and how lucky he was to have inherited your genes and to have had your love and support in all he did.

Gail Kraushar
These stories are a wonderful tribute to your amazing son, but I was particularly struck by the one about Norway.  I set aside the blogs to binge-read when we returned from a recent trip to Europe, which included, of all things, a stop in Norway. I had no idea before we went that it was a favorite destination of Jory’s. 

The scenery was indeed breathtaking but the tons of photos I took cannot nearly do it justice as well as Jory’s vivid and moving descriptions.  He was a fine writer in addition to his many other talents.  Thanks for posting all the entries, and this one in particular.

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