About

An artist’s heart, an engineering mind

As a kid in West Virginia, I spent a lot of time building fun engineering projects to customize my space.  I remember rigging a complicated pulley system to flip my light switch from my bed on the opposite wall.  I also spent a lot of time around musicians, who were always discussing chords, chord progressions, and chord structures.  One word seemed to describe all the tunes I liked; everyone called them “modal” tunes, but no one could explain to me what that really meant.

Long internet searches to find the answer on ancient, pre-YouTube websites led me down a music theory rabbit hole. I couldn’t get enough.  Each question I answered led to another question, another world to explore.  I learned about music I had never been properly introduced to, music that I would eventually end up studying. I had also always had an interest in electronic music, always loving the sounds that I heard in dance music or sound tracks. But I could never understand exactly what was producing those sounds. And even though I was learning all of this on a computer, somehow I believed that computer science was for other people, surely people smarter than me.

That all changed when I moved to Chicago to study music composition.

Electronic music was the gateway to data science

At Columbia College, I had a wonderful professor who saw a lot of potential in me. He nudged me toward electronic music lessons.  I started working in Max/MSP, a program designed to give artists an intuitive low-code/no-code environment to develop aesthetic programs. From working in Max, I learned about FFT processing, Markov chains, and using APIs to import data from other programs and devices.

Eventually, I realized most of the music I was interested in involved probability, algorithms, and novel controllers (an old flight sim joystick, a Wiimote, a mixer I built in my iPhone). That led me to another realization: maybe I actually like data?

At the beginning of 2020, I was at the height of a 10-year career in music performance/education and my wife was pregnant with our first child. The pandemic brought my career plans to a regrettable halt, and that was my sign to get serious about computer science.  With the support of colleagues, a very helpful mentor, a Coursera certificate program, and a whole lot of blogs and YouTube videos, here I am.  Thanks for taking the time to get know me.