To catch up with two electronic music visionaries—one an ‘80s synth-pop innovator, the other a ‘90s trance pioneer—we’re using nothing but the most advanced technology: a crackly speaker phone in a dressing room at Georgia’s 1,000-seat Center Stage Atlanta, where “An Evening With BT and Thomas Dolby” is about to play to a full house.

The month-long tour, coming to the Birchmere on Friday, grew out of a meeting in April, when BT (Brian Transeau when he was growing up in Rockville) went to the House of Blues in Los Angeles to catch Dolby’s one-man show, the transplanted Englishman’s first concert tour since 1992. That’s because Dolby had been central to one of BT’s career-inspiring moments: the 1985 Grammy telecast in which Dolby, wearing a Mozart-style wig, led Herbie Hancock, Howard Jones and Stevie Wonder through a medley of their hits played solely on a variety of synthesizers.

“His work meant so much to me as a teenager, but that was particularly significant,” BT says. “Seeing those guys together completely took my head off—a defining moment. Another is I remember riding my bike to the movie theater and watching ‘Blade Runner’ six times in one day, all cracked out on cinnamon candies, listening to Vangelis’s score and thinking someday I have to do that.” (He would; more on that later.)

Dolby, born Thomas Morgan Robertson 48 years ago, picked up the Dolby nickname when he started building his own synthesizers as a teenager. In the early ‘80s, he had several catchy novelty hits with “She Blinded Me With Science” and “Hyperactive!” that obscured much better, intimate and personal efforts such as “Budapest by Blimp,” “One of Our Submarines” and “The Flat Earth”—songs that put the technology at the service of traditional song craft.

“What I admire most about Thomas’s work is it’s a perfect intersection between the real rootsy, earthy humanity of songwriting and technology, connecting my two favorite things,” says BT, 35. “With other people who were heroes of mine in the same era—Depeche Mode, Cabaret Voltaire and Kraftwerk—it was the opposite of that. Their whole esthetic was the sterility of technology and machines. Thomas was one of, if not the first, person I heard that was trying to breathe life into them, and that really stuck with me.”

For his part, Dolby says his influences have always been “songwriters that have a unique style to their lyrics and voice, and it didn’t really matter whether the accompaniment was guitar or piano or string quartet or rock band. When the electronics started to hit the scene, the typical thing to say was machines are machines, they are brainless, and we are their slaves.”

“ ’We are the robots,’ “ BT interjects robotically, conjuring the famous Kraftwerk lyric.

“I was a songwriter in the tradition of people I looked up to, but I was strumming on my synthesizer versus a guitar or piano,” Dolby continues. “Everything was really secondary to telling the story, getting that idea across.”

According to Dolby, one of the pleasures of the current tour is that he and BT “have very similar sensibilities, but from a different background and different eras, so it’s amazing to see the intersections with our music and sounds and with our audiences.”

The Maryland-born BT first made his mark with local production duo Deep Dish and then as a pioneer of trance, during which he introduced the popular stutter edit in the late ‘90s. There also have been remixes, occasional pop work (NSync’s “Pop") and, just as BT once hoped, film scores, including “Monster” and “Stealth.”

Like Dolby, BT has increasingly emphasized the human side of electronica, particularly with 2003’s “Emotional Technology” and its supple mix of trance and pop song craft. That approach is even more evident on his most recent album, “This Binary Universe,” which features seven compositions accompanied by seven animated films on a companion DVD. BT’s portion of Friday’s Birchmere show will consist of a surround-sound performance in which BT and two other musicians will play live as the films are projected.

A beautiful, emotionally enveloping album, “This Binary Universe” has been described by BT as instrumental “lullabies” he wrote for his newborn daughter, Kaia, who apparently spent a lot of time sleeping on his lap throughout much of the composing process. The last film, “Good Morning Kaia,” is a moving celebration of his now 2-year-old, with words of love and hope floating across home movies as pure poetry.

The album melds what BT calls his three major “streams”: the classically trained keyboardist and composer, who wrote several pieces for a 110-piece orchestra; exotic, asymmetrical jazz elements that echo his film scores; and more traditional electronica elements that use programs he created for Sonik Architects, the software company he started two years ago. The first two commercial products will be available soon: StutterEdit and BreakTweaker, which BT has called the first surround-sound drum machine. Every beat on the new record is done in BreakTweaker, in which, BT explains, “note figures of 2,048th and 1,024th notes can spline down into eighth note triplets exponentially over a dotted quarter note, allowing electronic performers to do fractal micro-note editing and nonlinear . . . gestures in real time.”

Actually, BT lost me at “spline,” but it’s worth noting that one track, “1.618,” is devoted to the golden ratio (for an instant headache, look it up on http://www.mathworld.com). Not surprisingly, at that April meeting at the House of Blues, the conversation turned to technology pretty quickly.

“You could measure it in milli-seconds,” Dolby chuckles, with BT confirming: “It was instantaneous. We were geeking out hard immediately.”

Dolby wasn’t particularly successful as a recording artist—his fifth and final album was 1992’s “Astronauts & Heretics.” But after leaving the music business in 1993, he became a hitmaker in another field: He founded Beatnik, a software company that developed the polyphonic ring-tone technology used in two-thirds of the world’s cellphones. Being Beatnik’s largest shareholder freed him to pursue music again, including the kind of one-man shows he did in small European clubs in the late ‘70s. He recently released “The Sole Inhabitant,” a live CD and DVD featuring the solo show’s new arrangements of signature songs.

Clearly, Dolby is having fun, coming onstage in a trench coat, sporting the familiar mad scientist/aviator goggles and a military-issue head camera that allows fans to watch him building his songs track by track via a Mac G5 with Logic and an array of synthesizer keyboards, drum pads, samplers and gear both new (laptops) and vintage (oscilloscopes). A VJ combines Dolby’s head feed with visual effects and footage on a widescreen monitor.

Ironically, Dolby admits that he hadn’t really kept up with new music technology and that much of what allows him to work alone onstage now evolved during his hiatus. “In the last 10 or 15 years, the only hard work I’d had to do with music was on ring tones where you want something very simple. There’s no point in kidding yourself you can reproduce really complex sounds on a half-inch speaker. It wasn’t until the end of last year, when I decided to do this, that I had to catch up on a lot of technology.” Dolby says he’s excited to have the opportunity to re-explore old music with new technologies and software, adding that his “hat’s off to BT, who every night is trying out new technologies and new techniques and taking a big risk out there.”

Doing separate sets, they have worked up a collaboration on “Airwaves,” one of Dolby’s first efforts and, he says, “the only song I’ve ever recorded where I wished I could go back and undo what I did. I did a demo cassette in 1980 with a four-track and a Dr. Rhythm drum machine, but when I came to do it on the album, the record company said it had to be ‘radio-friendly,’ and I went a bit AOR [album-oriented rock] with it, and I regretted that. The demo version was a lot truer to the song, so I’m looking forward to doing a stripped-down version of it.”

BT and Thomas Dolby Appearing Friday at the Birchmere Sounds like: The future is now.