Meet the band.

Oliver runs Tonotopia day to day: the partners, the build and the launch. He started out running restaurants, nightclubs and bars, then restaurants for Four Seasons in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, a job that teaches you to answer the question before the guest asks it. Then came nearly a decade of partnerships for restaurant-tech startups Omnivore, Postmates and Punchh, all three since acquired.

He grew up in St. Louis, where Broadway Oyster Bar and BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups were regular stops, and his family went to New Orleans at least once a year. His favorite spot is the Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street. He was treasurer of the California Music and Culture Association, sells vintage vinyl at Oliver's Records & Oddities, and is finishing executive education at Berkeley Haas.

The idea for Tonotopia started with Rich and spiraled outward. Rich wanted a picture of sound that the eye could read as easily as the ear hears it. Rich’s educational background spans fluid and thermal science, life sciences and mathematics, plus experience measuring sound underwater, imaging, data compression and scientific visualization. Sounds like he was made for this.

Rich held roles in engineering, research, applications and management at Eastman Kodak and Xerox PARC. In 2000 he left to cofound Labcyte, which pioneered acoustic dispensing, using focused ultrasound to move liquid. Its instruments launch tiny droplets, so small it would take 2 million of them to fill a teaspoon, each leaping from an open pool at the sound’s command, with no pipette and no physical contact. Beckman Coulter Life Sciences acquired Labcyte in 2019, and Rich stayed on as chief technology officer through 2023.

He’s a named inventor on more than 90 US patents, sings bass, practices his solfège on the Tonotopia beta in the shower (he says he gets better reviews when singing underwater), and still emails the team about the physics of piano strings and anything else that vibrates.

Dianne leads Tonotopia's legal work, from the patent and trademark filings to the terms you'll agree to when you download the app. She studied chemistry at MIT and worked as a nuclear chemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before law school at UC Hastings.

In more than 30 years of patent law she has been a partner at Irell & Manella and Morrison & Foerster and founded her own IP firm, with clients from Chiron to Caltech. She and Rich have worked together on patents for more than 25 years, Labcyte’s among them. A lifelong pianist, she played our guess-the-tune game early and told us the opening round was too hard until you know your spokes.