Music to our ears - striking the right note through our work

Have you ever visited our offices?

We invite you to take a virtual tour of our workspaces at the Genoa office. Those who visit us at the GREAT Campus technology park are often curious about the names we have chosen for our rooms, and this gives us an opportunity to talk about our model of collaboration.

On the clear glass walls of our corridors are displayed the names of great musicians, reminding us just how much, in an environment dedicated to technology, humanistic thought linked to art is a necessary factor in the process of innovation.

As an art form, Music simultaneously combines both abstraction and application. By linking single notes – units involving mathematics – a series of frequencies is created that make people feel as though they are one entity while they are surrounded by it; the same effect created by big narratives.

Anyone who has ever produced a musical masterpiece has created a common language that does not need to be translated – just as the name of the musician invites guests to come in, guiding them, whatever their native language, with precise pronunciation and without ambiguity.

Precision and possibilities: what music is all about. The plaque in the meeting rooms is a discreet reminder, for those who visit and experience our organisation, that the technology we export to the entire world is an expression of technique and creativity, but above all of collaboration.

As David Byrne tells us in his essay How Music Works, a successful ensemble inevitably requires a certain amount of flexibility and creative compromise; this is the innovative force of an orchestra or of a musical group, which, precisely because of the alleged limits imposed by others, is able to generate a superior experience for those who get to enjoy the results.

It is no coincidence, then, that various Digital Humanities experiments have been conducted to understand the collaborative mechanisms between musicians and to transfer them to other organisations. A code to which we all feel we can belong, understandable and inclusive, inspired and articulated on different rhythms, cultures, epochs, philosophies, technologies – because that's what these tools are.

These are all qualities that we recognise as our own or to which we aspire. Sound waves are made up of frequencies that, as we've discovered and continue to discover further, interact with the human body and create a sense of well-being. Flows of energy are intertwined with the notes and they flow just like blood running through our veins. They are based on vital rhythms, such as those of the heart, which we help to monitor with our instruments.

Are ultrasounds not based on mechanical sound waves? This type of art, which needs no words to communicate, is with us in every meeting – and in every new room we commemorate an author and his or her qualities.

Bach, mathematical composer and lover of numbers who applied Pythagorean ideas to his harmonies, has lent his name to the hall near the finance area, while Gershwin represents the modernity of the IT function. There are many names of composers and authors that feature on the agendas: Mahler, Brahms, Puccini. Every country that makes up our network becomes part of the geography of artists who invite you to come in, sit down and discuss ideas, issues and results.

As Giuseppe Mazzini once wrote, music has the ability to reconnect not only all the sciences and the arts, but also to bring together both the past and the future. In a period of transition, when everything is in search of a new equilibrium in the small and temporary anarchy of change, "human intellect thirsts for unity in all things", and it is music that is "a harmony of creation, an echo of the invisible world." And the future has the quality of being invisible until it finds the form that gives it innovation.

This is why we like to open ourselves up to the thought of art on a daily basis.