Designing Soundscape or how to simulate Sound Before It Exists

Julien: Welcome to Fighting Noise, the podcast where innovation meets action in the battle against noise pollution. My guest today is Finnur Pind a physicist and entrepreneur building the future of sound design. As CEO of Treble Technologies, he's helping the world simulate our spaces and product sounds before they exist. From concert halls to EV cabins to the Metaverse he's showing how better design can mean less noise, better health and smarter environments. Hi, Finnur, nice to have you here.

Finnur: Hey Julien, thanks for having me.

Julien: That's great, we could join. Live from Reykjavik in Iceland, right? That's great, and that's the first time for me with an Icelandic entrepreneur. Finnur, before I ask you to introduce yourself, you've done research into something very real, very understandable, changing how we hear our world, what moment made you realize that this could be more than a scientific tool?

Finnur: Exactly.

Julien: and that it could reshape what we designed for noise, soundscape and for silence.

Finnur: It has certainly been a journey over a long time, would say. So maybe it's not some one single moment that kind of changed everything, but rather the sort of accumulation of experiences over time, ranging from me starting as a musician and being obsessed about music and sound. Then being a practicing acoustic consultant where I was trying to help designers of the built environment to create a good sound environment. And then during my academic research years later where I was very fortunate to get to work with some great scientists and we were actually kind of, I could see that we were on a path to make some new technology, something that hadn't existed before and really had some, could open up some opportunities. And that's kind of when this idea formed of kind of turning this academic research, academic prototype into a product and trying to help make the world a better sounding place. Yeah, so say something like that.

Julien: That's great. So let's start with yourself. Who are you, Finnur? And what's your why? Well, maybe introduce what did you do before you started a little bit with that story and then why are you here today?

Finnur: Yeah. Right, exactly. So I am the CEO and co-founder of a company called Treble Technologies, which is a company that develops acoustic simulation software. And I'm happy to dive into the details of what we do, but indeed the journey has been like a lifelong sound enthusiast, sound nerd, educated as an acoustics engineer. And yeah, I've been going with Treble for five years now. Yeah.

Julien: starting during COVID.

Finnur: Exactly, 2020, that lovely year.

Julien: Lovely year, but perfect to start a new business. If you know why is noise and sound in general so poorly addressed in design and planning? Architects are mostly not trained into that topic of sound management. Why? What do you think?

Finnur: End it. That's a good question. I have some theories, let's say. ⁓ Maybe the first thing that brings to mind is the fact that sound is quite intangible. It's obviously invisible. ⁓ It's somehow hard to relate to or hard to control or hard to grasp how to... Yeah, exactly. It's intangible. And I think that makes it a bit...

Julien: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Finnur: difficult for people in general to kind of design for it, control it, think about it. And this is indeed one of the things we are really trying to address with Treble is to make tools that make it more tangible, make it easier, make it accessible to design and work with sound and acoustics and noise so that we can help people. make the world a better sounding place. Our slogan from day one has been enabling a better sounding world. And that, you know, we serve many different industries and so on, but that's really been the kind of through line. And the enabling part is a bit important for us because we're not the ones who directly make the world a better sounding place, but we enable others by giving them good tools to make the world a better sounding place.

Julien: Mm-hmm. So let's deep dive What's Treble? Maybe for an engineer or for a non-engineer because it can get quite geeky. in our audience at Fighting Noise and at nonoise we have different kinds of profiles from acousticians engineers, but also investors, journalists, and so on. So maybe for both targets, what is Treble?

Finnur: Ended. I mean, I think maybe I can start taking one step back. We're a simulation company. So what is simulation? That is to have a model of something on the computer and then you use the computer to predict how this thing is going to behave in real life. A couple examples, maybe you're designing the structural load in a building and you want to make sure how the structural load is kind of distributed before you know the building is built. So you're designing a car and you want to optimize the wind flow around the car. Then you can simulate air flow around the car. You're a computer chip and you want to distribute the heat in the computer chip. know, simulation, that's simulation. It's been very well established across decades.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Finnur: used in many industries and use cases and so on. It allows people to test things up front virtually, optimize designs, do that efficiently and so on. Now, when it comes to simulating how something is going to sound, I'm not going to claim we invented the concept of sound simulation, but there has been kind of limited availability of tools and technologies to simulate how something is going to sound. And it so happens that sound, you know very well, Julien, it's such an integral part of so many industries and products and services and so on. So being able to simulate how something is going to sound turns out to be quite valuable and interesting. And this is exactly what we in Treble are focusing on and delivering the solution for. And I can give examples of different use cases and so on, but that's sort of the high level picture.

Julien: We will jump into the examples, but before, what's trouble for an engineer? For an educated engineer, maybe sound engineer, ⁓ in your words.

Finnur: Yes, Then Treble is a cloud-based acoustic simulation and synthetic audio data generation platform powered by patented proprietary simulation technology that is 10 to 100 times faster than what has previously existed. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Julien: That's the real pitch. I feel like that's the real pitch and not the simulation anymore. Can you share with us a few real-world examples where maybe where you optimize the soundscape but also where you prevent noise problem when we speak about birding and fond. Can you give us a few industries more in general where you have enabled

Finnur: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Julien: partners to better shape the soundscape.

Finnur: All right. Absolutely. Maybe I can put it into three buckets. Built environment, it's kind of tech or products and cars. ⁓ So let's start with the built environment. That's maybe also somewhat easy to grasp. So imagine you're designing a building or some kind of built environment. It can be outdoor environments as well. And you want to make sure that

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Finnur: the thing not only looks great but also that it functions well, that it sounds good, that it's, you know, has an appropriate sound environment. You can use Treble for that. So, you you have your building design software and then Treble sort of plugs into that, allows you to know upfront how the thing is going to sound. So let's say you're setting a school or an office building or hospital and you want to make sure that, you know, the students can hear that the... workers in the office can have a good productive environment and so on. You can test all of this in Treble, change materials, change the shape of the environment, see how that impacts the sound environment. You can simply hear it. You can go into a virtual kind of walkthrough of the building and hear how it's going to sound. And then if I move the wall here or if change to this material, how is it going to sound and so on. So that's the... Build environment example, technology or products or consumer electronics. Imagine you're designing a smart speaker or sound bar or headset or something. You want to be able to test upfront how it's going to work, how it's going to sound, optimize the design of it. And what's kind of an emerging use case, which is kind of becoming our actually biggest line of business. is to simulate this audio device in maybe 10,000 different scenarios to train some kind of AI algorithm, like speech enhancement or noise reduction or some kind of adaptive AI audio algorithms. You train them via simulation. That's a very fast growing and exciting use case. The third one I'll mention was cars. Kind of same story as before, you have a car design, you want to optimize, you know, maybe the speakers in the car, try to create a great sound environment in the car. Cars are basically becoming like self-driving entertainment centers. So being able to create a great sound experience in there is an emerging use case as well.

Julien: Computers. Yeah. When you speak about buildings or cars, the unwanted sound outside, the noise, ⁓ is changing the perception of sound inside. You turn radio or music much louder if you're on the highway because you have much more noise coming from outside. Are you able to simulate this unwanted sound as well? Or you simulate only from the loud speakers in, let's say in the car, that's a...

Finnur: Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Julien: smaller piece or in the school with a teacher speaking, you simulate how the sound is reverbing, is bouncing on the walls. Are you able to take into account other sounds coming from outside unwanted sounds as well?

Finnur: Mm-hmm. I would say our main emphasis area is sort of sound within some kind of environment. indeed, maybe you have an auditorium and you want to optimize the acoustics of the auditorium. Or indeed, you're optimizing how a sound bar behaves in a living room or something like that. But yes, you can also incorporate kind of outside noise into the simulation. You can go from a very small scale like a car cabin all the way up to a huge area within the city and simulate this and then design and optimize for it. yeah, it kind of covers the whole scale, but still maybe a bit of a special emphasis on this sort of sound within the space.

Julien: and optimizing what we do here, the sound, more in general. Chris Berdik an American journalist working on noise pollution, I interviewed in a published episode last week, something like that, and he said it's much more about designing a better soundscape than turning everything into silence.

Finnur: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Julien: And I think it's a very optimistic and a very positive way of seeing the fight against noise pollution and that's what you're offering. Your platform accelerates what's used to take weeks or months, right? What's the other ROI of Treble for your customers?

Finnur: Right. Yeah, exactly. For example, in the context of the built environment, know, doing some kind of simulation or virtual prototyping or soundscape design, you know, some years ago, it was such a costly time consuming exercise that you would really only do it for like a very fancy concert hall or something like that. What we are really emphasizing is to make this so accessible and so fast and so easy to use that you use it, you know, it takes you five minutes to do it for an entire school, you know. That's kind of what we're heading for and have made very good progress along that way. So, you know, so that sound becomes an actual design parameter in these kind of bread and butter building projects. schools, offices, residential, etc. So that's really the kind of, I'm going to use the word paradigm shift, you know, from being a very niche specialized thing to being kind of a thing that you just in general take into account when designing the built environment.

Julien: You work with big techs, with big companies. Why is it now a thing? Why are you able to solve this issue and to turn weeks into minutes or hours to simplify this right now with your technology? Why did you get this and not the one or the competitors? We can speak about competitors too but...

Finnur: Mm-hmm.

Julien: Why is it the right moment to do that? Is it through technology? I don't know. AI enables what wasn't possible 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Why is it the right momentum?

Finnur: It is a combination of some technological breakthroughs. We're certainly standing on the shoulders of giants, you know. And then I would say also maybe a unique kind of insight or domain expertise in the field and kind of allowing us to take these great technologies that are emerging and then kind of really. using them or applying them to solve problems that we here in Treble are very familiar with from our previous work experience and so on. And just to elaborate, mean, these technological breakthroughs, this is cloud computing, this is massively parallel computing, these are numerical methods for solving differential equations which are very parallelizable and these are kind of new methods that can allow us to simulate much faster. And then we Then we've sort of built a lot of proprietary sound simulation technology on this and then package it and provide it to the industry and to kind of solve and tailor it towards specific problems and use cases that relate to sound and noise.

Julien: So you work with these big techs, big enterprise, do you have a few concrete examples you gave us the use cases you work on? Do you have projects you can speak about to have an explicit use case for, I don't know if it's for a car company or for a big tech or for software using your SDK, embedding your SDK and solving an issue?

Finnur: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Julien: Can you explain that kind of story to understand all you as a startup as well? What's your, to understand your go-to market at the end.

Finnur: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So let's take an example. We have several of the big tech giants on our customer list. We can maybe take that example. And they're kind of doing somewhat similar things, I would say, with Treble. For example, all this kind of voice technology, where you're communicating with a voice assistant like, you know.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Finnur: and maybe I won't name specific ones, you know, these major voice assistant technologies. And they work to a certain extent, but there are also many areas for improvement such that you can have more seamless communication with the device and with essentially with AI, voice becoming. So now we all use ChatGPT as kind of, know, with the keyboard, but I think exactly, exactly. Yeah.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Finnur: But that then needs to work extremely seamlessly in all different configurations and noisy conditions and all of that. And then they use Treble to generate thousands of different scenarios, virtual scenarios, with their specific devices and specific algorithms in those scenarios, stimulate that whole bunch to then train and improve such that this works very well in all conditions. And it can be on a smart speaker. It can be in here. AR headset or something like that, hearing aids to kind of train and develop these audio processing algorithms further. And the hardware itself also, you where do we put the microphones to get best performance and things like that. But that's...

Julien: to better record the voice and not disturb anything. I mean, the car itself as an example is a good example of a place, you say that, And at some point we all discussed in our car with our AI to plan some things, to do some things, but a car is a noisy environment. To be able to speak with.

Finnur: Exactly.

Julien: Any AI voice? I don't know. To speak with Alexa, or Siri, anything else, even in a loud environment. That's good. Maybe I will connect you to the start, but I did invest into it with SafeEase. is maybe some things to do with that. To understand as a startup, to understand your journey, what's your business model? How do you market?

Finnur: Yeah, Awesome.

Julien: It's not only an SDK, right? It's a platform already also as an SDK.

Finnur: It's yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's both kind of an application and an SDK, two different interfaces to the same simulation technology. Roughly speaking, you can kind of say that the SDK is for like these tech AI applications, maybe automotive as well. And the application is more towards these, let's call it design applications, you where you have maybe a building or something, you're kind of doing some iterations on that.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Finnur: on that design. So it's a GUI product and a programmatic interface. And this is also the beauty of working with sound, which makes it so fun is that you can cover a pretty broad ground, ranging from architects all the way to machine learning engineers in big tech companies. It's very fun. They're ultimately using the same technology, but still using it in different ways through different interfaces and so on.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Finnur: to do very different things, but all relating to sound and making a better sound experience.

Julien: But back to the business model, having fun to have such a diversity of projects makes it difficult to scale, possibly, and enable one of our projects, which can be fun, but less scalable. So how did you get it? you are at an outlet, maybe, if we can go into your traction to understand why you stand right now. I know you raised a CSA, I think, in last October, $12 million.

Finnur: Right. Mm-hmm. ⁓ Indeed. Yeah.

Julien: So what's your stage? Maybe a few figures about it if you allow me to ask. And then what's the business model behind? Because for me, seeing that is always as an investor, as a founder, is how do you get it to remove the project parts where it's a lot of fun again, but really not scalable.

Finnur: Right. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, so the application is kind of a typical SaaS business model, essentially. The SDK combines kind of a fixed subscription fee and a usage-based fee. Yeah, and that can become quite attractive from a business perspective because you can have just a handful of users, but they can use a lot because they're spinning up thousands and thousands of simulations.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Finnur: so on. So that's fundamentally the model. it's both cases not really working on a project basis, but more we're targeting customers who are doing this recurring work of either doing designs or doing algorithm development and product development on a recurring basis. And on both sides, really targeting very large markets. is again kind of the beauty, admittedly also, you know, it's a double-edged sword, you know, it's exciting, it's fun to work in sound because it's so broad that also implies a large market. But then, you know, you can't do everything. So you need to be kind of focused and then, you know, indeed do kind of scalable things like you say. So I think we found a very good fit here on these, roughly speaking, two sides, of buildings and tech where... This is a scalable, repeatable thing that we're seeing. we can, on the one hand, target all engineering consulting firms, all architect firms, and on the other hand, all product companies, all tech companies, and automotive companies, and so on.

Julien: I said you raised 12 million, do you communicate about revenue or recurring revenue or not?

Finnur: Yeah, would rather maybe not go into the very specific details, but let's say we're sort of in this transition region from a Series A company to a Series B company. And I think that can give you a feel for roughly where we are.

Julien: Okay. Okay, TSB planned for next year or already this year? Next year. because 2025 would have meant a very large scale in the last months. Very fast. Okay, 2026. And how many people? What about the team? You told me you were the CEO and co-founder. So maybe, what about your co-founders?

Finnur: Uh, next year. Yeah. 26. Yeah. Exactly, exactly, ⁓ Mm-hmm. Absolutely. have three great co-founders with me, Jesper, Ingemar and Gunnar. Me and Jesper started it originally. We're a couple of acoustics engineers. We met at uni back like 15 years ago, whatever. Then we sort of went our separate ways. I went into the building industry. He went into the product industry. But we were both kind of facing very similar problems that we couldn't, we didn't have tools, software tools to do the work we were supposed to be doing. I then went back to the university to do this PhD and research and so on with sort of the original seeds of treble were sown. And then we sort of came back together like, okay, we have this great prototype. We have these industry problems. Let's go. But we were a couple of acoustics nerds who did not know much about business or about software development. I mean, we knew a bit about software development, but not really. So we added two great guys as well, Gunnar, who...

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Finnur: was on the commercial side, who came from sales and marketing and software and IT and so on. And Ingemar, who was a proper software developer. So we had a good, broad founding team there.

Julien: Okay, and you all started in 2020 to work together after a few years of PhD work and research work on both sides. today you are, how many employees do you have? So, yep.

Finnur: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. We're just over 30 people now. you know, it's still maybe skewing a bit on the R &D side. But I would say, you know, now since our Series A, we've been going through this very fun transition of going from, let's call it an R &D or product development project to a business. So kind of scaling up the commercial side and the go-to-market aspect of the company. And that's been a fun journey. It's ongoing still, but yeah.

Julien: Mm-hmm. Everyone is in Reykjavik? Are you...

Finnur: Yes, we're a bit old school in that sense that we're just we're all in the same space here. Yeah.

Julien: in the same space, which is cool because you could say, or maybe it's very subjective from France or Germany, we would say, okay, it's really hard to find the right talents if you keep on your city. If you are in a small city anywhere in Europe, you start to be remote to attract talents everywhere. But you got it. I mean, you're one of the biggest...

Finnur: Exactly.

Julien: startups, scale-ups in Iceland right now? You've been entrepreneur of the year two years ago in Iceland?

Finnur: Yeah, exactly. It's growing nicely here and there are several great startups and scale-ups in Iceland. think the whole Icelandic tech ecosystem has really matured over the last decade or so. But yeah, I totally acknowledge that it's... Let's say the pool of acoustic simulation specialists in Reykjavik is not very big.

Julien: And it's behind you, behind the wall, yeah?

Finnur: Exactly. But I think around 50 % of our staff is not Icelandic. So we've been lucky to get people to come and join us here. We did decide to prioritize here in the early years to be in the same space because they're so fast moving. There's so much, you could call it chaos. That's maybe a bit of a negative word. Let's call it agility and innovation.

Julien: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Finnur: So we decided to be all here in the same space to promote that. Certainly acknowledging that with time and if things continue to go well that maybe we won't only stay in Reykjavik forever.

Julien: And always the ecosystem, tech ecosystem, are you close to the US? And in terms of, I don't know, of best practices or mentality or closer to Scandinavia, Denmark, for instance, I know you've been in Denmark too and to Western Europe. What's the mindset and the culture, the tech culture?

Finnur: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Julien: of Icelandic startups. What would you say?

Finnur: Yeah, exactly. That's a good question. I think Iceland in general is both geographically and culturally maybe a little bit between the US and Europe. we, you know, we're kind of someone, someone said we're like Scandinavia, but with trucks and

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Finnur: big parking lots. maybe that also kind of finds its way into the startup and taxing and so on. If you'd put a gun to my head, are we Europe or US? I would say Europe, but maybe we skew a little bit towards the US side as well. And Iceland in general has this, I would say pretty nice sort of can-do. attitude. The national slogan is, "Thetta reddast!" which kind of means something like, it will all work out, we'll figure it out, you know, so it's like, only solutions, no problems, you know, and, you know, and, you know, you need to be a bit of a generalist here and all of that. So, yeah, and specifically about the ecosystem, you know, 20 years ago, there was no VC here, there was no kind of

Julien: Love it.

Finnur: startup scene. We've had some great companies certainly built up over the decades and so on. then, know, yeah, maybe starting 2012, 2013, kind of we started to get some VCs and yeah, things have been growing since

Julien: And speaking about VCs, what about your cap table? Is it a US cap table? Is it a European one?

Finnur: It's a European one. We have a couple of VCs, one European, sort of across Europe and one Icelandic. We have a couple of strategic partners as well, which are both European firms, Sankoban in the built environment and then L Acoustics, which is one of the larger sound system manufacturers. And then some great kind of angel investors as well and so on.

Julien: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. OK, Saint-Gobain, there will be in a few weeks a new episode of Fighting Noise interviewing Saint-Gobain around the topic of noise. we connect dots even if I didn't know about it in your case. ⁓ That's great. Let's talk about the market because you said it's...

Finnur: fantastic. Fantastic.

Julien: And I said it in the introduction before we start recording, it's a bit of an old-fashioned ecosystem, acoustics more original, focusing for us, no, it's focusing on innovation in the topic of noise pollution and acoustics. We really see that this ecosystem is accelerating now, but coming from an old-fashioned world. So speaking about that, you are on a niche.

Finnur: Mm.

Julien: and you are doing quite well in terms of figures and in terms of products, but you still are on this niche of designing soundscapes. So a few words about the market out there, or is it for you as an Icelandic soundscape design startup or sound simulation startup to create a market? What's size of this market you're in? Tell me about it.

Finnur: Mm-hmm. Exactly. approach this.

Julien: Let's speak about competitors if you want. Do you have big competitors out there annoying you in the day to day?

Finnur: I would say to some extent we are creating the market here. So we're kind of in some sense first movers. I'm not saying that there aren't no, you know, there are some others doing some sound simulation stuff, but we are to some extent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, on the one hand, I would say that, you know, sound in general is maybe not a niche.

Julien: But the way do we do it?

Finnur: Everywhere, it's an important part of products, of the built environment, of cars, transportation, et cetera. But indeed, tools for designing and optimizing that, that's maybe something that's coming or something that is now being called for, something that wasn't maybe so much used or needed in the past. Yeah. I think we've struck a nice balance between finding a niche, know, so there's not like hundreds, hundred companies going for what we're going for, but still big enough to make sense for a venture capital kind of journey, let's say.

Julien: Yeah, exactly, because it's great to have a niche, but it can be a bit too small for that kind of journey. You said it. But what's your goal? Which future use case excites you most? You spoke about advanced sound planning, about building. You spoke about AR, VR. A lot about AI. You spoke about the automotive industry. So what's...

Finnur: Exactly. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Julien: What's your target use case on your roadmap? What do you want to do? What is most exciting for you?

Finnur: it's like having to pick between your kids, you know. Our vision is to become or to stay and become even more kind of a multi-product, multi-use case platform where the sound is the central theme. So we're not going to focus exclusively on one, but instead kind of have a bit of a diversification here.

Julien: hahahaha

Finnur: I would say that the whole tech, AI, indeed AR, use cases, these are very fast moving use cases industries. There's a lot of stuff happening. We talked about voice being an interface to AI and so on. And that's an avenue that's moving very fast. And so that makes it quite exciting. But I'm also a fan of the built environment and passionate about the kind of health impacts of noise pollution and all of those things. maybe a bit of a more conservative industry. But on the flip side, think the potential is quite large because just think about the amount of buildings being designed every day. And we truly want ultimately that most buildings will be virtually tested for sound before they're built. So that can be a very large ultimate.

Julien: Mm-hmm.

Finnur: market. So I think these things complement each other, kind of this fast moving taxing and then this bit more slow burn, but large ultimate potential on the built environment side.

Julien: I acknowledge that. I fully understand that. I had an episode with Thomas from an Austrian startup called Seven Bell, doing acoustic cameras and working a lot on building and on the cost of reworking, rebuilding. And it was

Finnur: Okay. Mmm.

Julien: In this industry, the same why we have solutions, completely different solutions. And you are way in advance being able to simulate what Annie is able to measure in buildings. But you are able to simulate that. I fully understand that. If cities.

Finnur: Hmm.

Julien: architects or product designers even has to remember one thing from Treble and out from this conversation. What should it be? What should it be?

Finnur: Yeah, indeed, to kind of avoid mistakes and ultimately create better sound experiences with less cost than what has been previously possible. I think that's the of the through line that sound simulation offers.

Julien: That's great. So everyone already singing about sound simulation should have a look at Treble. Or to reach out to you or to Treble. Very logistically, is it on LinkedIn or what's best way to get in touch with you, if you know.

Finnur: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn or you can check out our website treble.tech and yeah, reach out to us there.

Julien: Okay, then my last question I like is what can you do for our audience out there? You gave a good hint for architects and designers but what can you do for our audience and the opposite way, what can they do for you and for Tribble?

Finnur: Yeah, exactly. mean, I think we can provide these tools and they can help, like we've been discussing, know, different use cases in industries, create better sound experiences, reduce noise and so on. So I think for what they could do for us is just to give it a shot, try it. It's actually free to try. It's quite easy to use. know, we're trouble, for example, being adopted in a lot of universities these days because people find that it's quite nice tool to sort of get to know a little bit about sound and how sound behaves in environments and so on and simulate that and hear how different things impact the sound environment and so on. So it can be just a fun tool to kind of play around with, free to try and all that. So yeah.

Julien: Okay, so have fun and try to work on that. I I have in mind, I had another question I wanted to ask you, so I will finish with that last question. What's your take on noise pollution? We speak a lot about designing better soundscape, but what's your experience? I could have started the interview with that one.

Finnur: Mmm. Right, right.

Julien: Maybe I will reproduce, I don't know. But what's your take on noise pollution? And do you think you have a play on optimizing the way people perceive noise and noise pollution? Or unwanted sounds?

Finnur: Yeah, exactly. I think it is an underestimated issue. I know there's been some research done on it and so on, but the general perception is maybe not that it doesn't get the weight it deserves. I think it's having a pretty substantial impact on our health and well-being. And indeed, there's some research that backs that statement up. You can feel it yourself when you go from a very noisy area to a quiet or more pleasant soundscape. How your shoulders kind of sink and your stress levels go down and so on. So I think it's an urgent area to look into. Happy to be contributing to that with TREBUL. I will also say that... I liked this comment you made earlier or your previous guest, that it's maybe not just about reducing sounds, but it's about creating a right soundscape or the right type of sound rather than just reducing sound. I think that's a good way to think about it as well. And also, again, some research that backs this up that you can have two types of sounds which are at the same level, but one is You know, has a positive impact and another one has a negative impact. Yeah.

Julien: There's a lot to do. When I see the great product you did already and the potential of being able to simulate outside noises coming into a space, and when I see the space of psychoacoustic, which is the way people perceive sound, even if it's not a loud sound, it can be very low level, but very, very different.

Finnur: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Julien: I think the potential and still the work on the roadmap is quite big if we are going to solve all of this, which is really exciting and really promising. Finnur Pind, the founder and CEO of Icelandic Startup Treble Technologies. Thanks a lot for being here today. I hope you enjoyed this episode and for the audience, listeners, thanks a lot for listening or watching this.

Finnur: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Julien: episode on YouTube and I hope you enjoyed it. Don't hesitate to comment this episode, to share it to your network, to your audience and see you soon. We have an unwanted sound as last comment. So that was a perfect illustration of the work to do. Thanks everyone for listening and thanks a lot, Finnur, for your time.

Finnur: Exactly, it just started drilling here. Thanks for having me. It was a great conversation.