{"id":157042,"date":"2023-04-18T19:06:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-18T19:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tecscience.tec.mx\/en\/?p=157042"},"modified":"2023-08-02T23:28:38","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T23:28:38","slug":"edgar-barroso-let-tec-de-monterrey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tecscience.tec.mx\/en\/business-innovation\/edgar-barroso-let-tec-de-monterrey\/","title":{"rendered":"Edgar Barroso: “Musical thinking contribute to other disciplines”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Edgar Barroso <\/a>looks younger than he actually is (he’s 45), perhaps due to his passionate, jovial style of speaking. The director of the Laboratory for Entrepreneurship and Transformation (LET)<\/a> of the Tec\u2019s School of Government and Public Transformation <\/a>holds a PhD in musical composition from Harvard University. The first thing I asked him was what music had to do with entrepreneurship. Totally at ease, he rolled up his shirt sleeves as if he were getting together with some old friends and started talking about the topic confidently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were on the fifth-floor terrace of the Monterrey Campus library with a great view of the Cerro de la Silla, the iconic mountain overlooking the city of Monterrey. The view took his breath away, as it does to every visitor. Although he has worked for the Tec<\/a> for several years, Edgar has put down roots in Switzerland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On this occasion, he had come to the annual board meeting and had made the most of the opportunity by also taking in a Def Leppard gig. After the interview, I realized that all this was like a summary of his life, where his passion for education, entrepreneurship, and music are melded together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read somewhere that as a child you used to \u201cplay at listening.\u201d What was that about?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still do that. I\u2019m doing it right now in this interview. But as a kid I would imagine I was listening to a song, and it felt so real that I would ask anyone who happened to be with me if they could hear it too. It\u2019s like walking into a room, a library, or a cafe and catching a whiff of something in the air. My hearing always brings back memories, I mean, I remember places and people more because of what they sound like than anything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Edgar Barroso when he was a Composition student playing his cello (Photo: Courtesy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When did you decide to study music at university? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to my big brother, I got into groups like Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin when I was very young, and I would spend hours listening to them. But I reckon I started thinking about studying music when I was 11 and a coach gave me a cassette of Beethoven\u2019s \u201cSixth Symphony.\u201d <\/a>I thought it was spectacular. I played it on my Walkman time and again. When my friends asked me what I was listening to, I would say Metallica (a band I also like) because I was embarrassed they would find out I was listening to classical music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edgar studied musical composition at the University of Guanajuato and went on to do a doctorate at Harvard. Moreover, he has run a variety of socially relevant citizen collaboration projects involving music, such as \u201cManos al sonido\u201d (Let\u2019s make some sounds), where he and a group of friends taught youngsters from children\u2019s homes in Le\u00f3n, Guanajuato, to edit music, not just to bring them closer to technology, but also to develop their musical thinking. Another project, \u201c60 minutos por M\u00e9xico\u201d (60 minutes for Mexico), involved persuading people to give up an hour of their time for a social cause. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What inspired you to get involved in this kind of social initiative?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One day, while I was studying for my PhD, I was coming out of a meeting where we had been discussing the spectromorphology of sound in Denis Smalley\u2019s work when I learned that my family had been robbed in Mexico. They had held an automatic rifle to my brother\u2019s head and beat him up. I realized how disconnected I had become from reality, and I started wondering if I wanted to live in an academic bubble, doing research that five people in the world might find interesting, or if I was going to dedicate my life to trying to make a difference. Since then, my work has focused on finding ways that music and musical thinking, which involve mathematics, complex systems, temporal interactions, and so on, might contribute to other disciplines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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With his parents, during his graduation from Harvard’s PhD in Music Composition. (Photo: Courtesy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Was that how you transitioned from music to entrepreneurship? At first glance, they seem unrelated.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Entrepreneurship involves a great deal of creativity if you conceive it as an attempt to try and do something new and unique. In that respect, it\u2019s like artistic production. Few people are aware of the depth of research involved in artistic production; it\u2019s not just inspiration. So now at the LET we\u2019re trying to foster an approach to public entrepreneurship from a scientific and complex adaptive-systems perspective. There\u2019s also evidence of the influence that music, and consequently musical thinking, has on other disciplines. For example, Fabiola Gianotti may be the director of the CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) and hold a doctorate in experimental particle physics, but she is also a professional pianist. Fabiola believes that music has been an essential part of her education, her intellect, her science and civilization. And I could mention many more cases, like Aaron Berkowitz, a composer who did the same doctorate as me and is now a renowned neuroscientist. So, I believe that people who study music professionally can make contributions to other disciplines because their musical thinking can be applied to other disciplines in the same way we are doing it at the School of Government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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