REAL DOLBY SOUND

Electronic Musician Thomas Dolby likes the new interactive media-it's the electronic music that he hates. What bothers Dolby most about the sounds of computer games, he says, are those ''irritating loops of bleeps and blips. They create an annoying background to what you're doing, but they don't really enhance the twists and turns of where you're going.'' Twists and turns are certainly familiar to Dolby, who first gained popularity in the U.S. in 1983 for his hit ''She Blinded Me With Science'' and who's taken a decidedly unstraightforward approach to his musical career. The English keyboard artist and synthesizer whiz has explored several directions: He's produced albums for George Clinton and Joni Mitchell, released four of his own (a fifth one is due out next month), and written songs and scores for movie soundtracks ranging from Ken Russell's Gothic to the animated FernGully: The Last Rainforest. But Dolby's interest in new technology and the growing popularity of interactive media have led him toward a new career: musician for the interactive age. ''If the public is spending more time playing games than they are listening to music,'' Dolby says, ''then I feel that I have a definite compulsion to improve the quality of the music that they're hearing.'' Among other projects, Dolby and his audio production company, Headspace, composed the moody score for Double Switch, a 1993 interactive game for Sega CD featuring Corey Haim and Debbie Harry, and consulted on the sound for an Iwerks Entertainment ride in Norfolk, Va., which simulates a submarine's descent into Loch Ness. He's also codeveloping a CD-ROM game based on Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 movie The Conversation. ''It would quite possibly be the first game driven principally by the audio rather than by visuals,'' he says. Married to actress Kathleen Beller, Dolby spends most of the year in L.A., where Headspace is headquartered. The rest of the time, he, his wife, and their two daughters, ages 1 and 3, live in a small town about two hours outside of London that overlooks the North Sea (''It doesn't even have a pub,'' Dolby says). While he's worked on long-distance musical projects-using the telephone and express-mailed audiotapes-he has little interest in wiring up his hideaway for high-fidelity phone lines and video teleconferencing. In the arts, he says, ''There's really no substitute for human contact.'' Evidently, Dolby feels that even science has its limits.