LJ Rich

LJ Rich is best known for presenting on the BBC’s flagship technology show ‘Click’, explaining how music, technology and social trends work, though she’s also gathering notoriety talking about her synaesthesia – a mixing of the senses that gives her both super powers and fatal flaws.

Synesthesia is a neurological condition where the senses are mixed together – for example, seeing colours when hearing music. Even food tastes and textures map to musical keys, and LJ was interviewed in The New York Times about her experiences as a synaesthete and musician.

As a presenter of Click she has met founders, hackers and artists across the globe; from Stevie Wonder to Steve Wozniak and has interviewed some of the world’s most influential people – including former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Eben Upton of Raspberry Pi and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

She has travelled the world to chronicle technology trends – though she’s also no stranger to The Today Programme, Woman’s Hour, the BBC Breakfast sofa and more. In 2015 she was invited to speak at TEDx Tokyo where she talked openly about her synaesthesia, having the rare auditory phenomenon ‘Perfect Pitch’ and explaining its role in her own creative process.

LJ (Laura-Jane) loves to think differently about technology and in the last few years, she’s been wired up to cinema story lines, controlled light and music with her brain, sat in the driver’s seat of an autonomous vehicle, built her own bone-conduction sound transmitting device, fixed her own iPad, co-written a one-night-only sci-fi comedy musical, successfully landed an airship in a simulator, composed binaural sound scapes in real time, performed live in a Tokyo 3D Printing Cafe with a dancing robot, and won a hackathon or two.

In VR she’s ridden skateboards, punched sharks, seen herself from 2 metres away in real time, and ridden a roller coaster in Virtual and Real life at the same time. Prior to working at the BBC, LJ was a sound engineer for Pete Waterman’s studios. She was also the top-selling technology expert on QVC (The Shopping Channel) watching trends unfold from inside the consumer electronics industry.

As a kid, LJ won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where she fell in love with their electronic music studio. It was here that she plugged data from planetary orbits into a music sequencer so she could listen to the solar system.

Now LJ creates unique musical experiences for audiences from Harvard to Tokyo, Paris & LA. She also composes non-linear music for art installations for the likes of Disney, Austin’s SXSW festival, the UK’s Bestival and California’s Nocturnal Wonderland.

She has a masters in Music from Christ Church Oxford, and adores science fiction, japanese food and recreational lock-picking.

LJ Rich has her finger on the pulse of emerging technologies and how humans engage with it; interacting with hundreds of start ups, hack spaces, businesses, artists and technologists across the globe. This, together with her musical skills, makes her ideal to host an event with a technology, change, futurist or creativity and innovation theme.

She is a world-class keynote speaker on technology trends and enjoys augmenting her presentations with music and interactive performance. Her talks on tech trends always involve audience participation, and she absolutely loves collaborating to create magic.

LJ has been interviewed for The New York Times, lectured at Harvard University, presented at NASA HQ and performed on stage for the United Nations. She speaks on Synaesthesia, Music and Machines, Virtual Communication and runs bespoke presenting courses for organisations.

In 2019, LJ hosted the United Nations AI for Good Summit. 2020 saw her invited back to host – this time remotely – from her home studio in the UK.
For the UN Cultural Event during the Summit in 2019, LJ created a performance for two pianos and two computers at the United Nations Palais for an audience of over 600 distinguished ministers, ambassadors, scientists and honoured guests including the Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.