Editor’s note: Besides tracking technological advancements and innovations, our author is a Juilliard-trained musical composer. Listen to “Story Notes,” an original improvisation by Howard Lieberman, composed for this column.
Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t sing either. Stories do. And sometimes, so do notes.
In my last column, I wrote about how finance and technology have drifted toward storytelling at the expense of evidence. Investors, voters, and dreamers often follow what feels emotionally right rather than what can be measured. That same dynamic plays out in music, but through sound instead of spreadsheets. The difference between an honest tone and a hyped one can be heard in a single breath.
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about what I call microdynamics. These are the small, continuous changes in energy that make a performance feel alive. They are the difference between mechanical precision and human expression, between the machine and the musician. A plucked or struck instrument like a guitar, piano, or drum delivers its truth at the instant of attack. Once the note is born, physics takes over. But continuously controlled instruments like the voice, violin, cello, flute, or an electronic wind instrument live in motion. The sound never stops evolving. Every moment carries intention.
That is why singers, string players, and wind instrumentalists seem to tell stories even without words. They exist in a feedback loop with their sound. They can shape a phrase from beginning to end, inflecting pitch, tone, and pressure as naturally as a sentence. The listener does not just hear the result. They feel the gesture.
When I sit at a piano, the story ends the moment my finger leaves the key. When I sing, or play guitar, or now breathe into an electronic wind instrument, the story continues for as long as I sustain the line. It is a conversation between air and intention, between physics and emotion. That is what separates mere sound from narrative.
This new instrument, the Vangoa EWI 100, cost me less than a restaurant dinner. It arrived on my doorstep with a USB C cable, ten built-in sounds, and a rechargeable battery. These are humble specifications for a tool that may change how I compose. Its breath sensor translates air pressure into MIDI data, which means I can control the intensity of a flute, oboe, or clarinet line not by foot pedal or automation but by breathing. My lungs become the controller. My breath becomes the story.
This is the kind of technology I love, not because it is new but because it restores something ancient. It brings breathing back into being. I have spent years shaping virtual instruments through expression pedals and software envelopes, but those tools are still mechanical. The wind controller feels organic. It is a digital instrument that behaves like a living one.
This purchased reality also strongly contradicts an economic manufacturing/politically manufactured story. The one that says manufacturing is coming back to the United States and that tariffs will be the driving force for it. This is utter nonsense. Not only could we never manufacture anything like this device, but we could not even buy the parts for less anywhere, even in China, where they are selling this product. When I was a design engineer at Bose, we would purchase products made by other companies and disassemble them to determine the cost of their parts, which helped us assess their potential profitability.
We did not do this to reverse engineer them, as our egos were too large to bother imitating anyone else, and we never did. We charged more and delivered more. However, we did need to understand the basic economics that governed the rest of the world. All companies do this to understand their competition; you have to. So, every time I acquire a new product, I have the well-honed tendency to assess its cost. Many of my friends habitually do as well, and since Tom Friedman reminded all of us in 2005 that The World Is Flat, the disparity between American manufacturing and American labor costs compared to the rest of the world has been increasing. And as an aside, at Bose, we were doing all our manufacturing in Framingham, Mass., because we had designed robots to deal not only with rising labor costs but also with the difficulty of meeting our quality standards. In short, we had discovered that excellence was not very scalable in the eighties and nineties. (And now it is – internationally.) The notion that we can compete with slave labor salaries is absurd, even if we all became slaves, because slaves cannot afford to live in the USA.
The stories being told to Americans by our current administration are physically impossible, and this is becoming increasingly obvious to more and more people. This small digital saxophone I purchased could not be manufactured and sold in America for less than $500, no matter what the storytellers say, because they are ignorant of reality and have never taken apart a product to see what it costs in their lives. You see, they are storytellers, not engineers.
The same applies to climate change, nonlinear short-term inexpensive AI, or the profitability of quantum computing. When a society permits itself to be controlled by storytellers instead of experienced individuals who actually know how to do things like manage, design, and generate profit, we are flirting with a widespread manipulation economy where reality has a shrinking voice. This will not end well, because none of it is sustainable.
You need to talk to people who actually know the details about reality because they have experience. For example, let’s return to the details of how music is made. As a guitarist, I have always chased microdynamics through touch, through pick angle, finger pressure, and the way a string releases energy. As a singer, I have learned to sculpt emotion through phrasing and breath. But the wind controller sits right in between those worlds. It bridges the tangible and the invisible. It connects the player’s inner rhythm directly to the sound’s outer life. What fascinates me most is how this mirrors the tension between story and evidence that I wrote about last week. In finance, as in music, people fall in love with stories because they move faster than facts. A good narrative can sweep us along before we notice whether it is real. The same is true in performance. The audience feels the arc before they analyze it.
Sooner or later, both investors and listeners learn the same lesson. A story untethered from reality eventually collapses. In music, grounding comes through tone, timing, and truth. In business, it comes through results. The common thread is balance between emotion and structure, between what moves us and what sustains us. Microdynamics are the musical proof of that balance. They are measurable, physical, and yet completely emotional. They show that art and science are not opposites, but mirrors.
I have built companies, orchestras, and systems. Every one of them began as a story. But they only lasted because they had numbers, because they worked. The same applies to sound. Breath alone is just air. It becomes music only when shaped by discipline.
This week, as I plugged in the new wind controller and played my first notes, I felt something that reminded me why I do all of this—the composing, performing, writing, and innovating. It is the sensation of life flowing through a system. Air becomes sound. Sound becomes story. Story becomes structure.
In the end, whether you are investing, composing, or simply trying to make sense of the world, the lesson is the same. Seduction without substance fades. The trick is to make the story breathe while also standing out. That is where microdynamics live, in the space between idea and execution, between the math and the magic, between what is measured and what is felt. And that is where all good stories, musical or otherwise, truly begin.
