From Saxophone to Speakers
Why a jazz kid who built speaker boxes by hand became an engineer, and why the artistic and technical paths were never really two paths.
People sometimes look at my career and see a strange path: audio engineer, then Dolby, then Google, then robots that paint with your mind. But to me it has always been one continuous thread, and it starts with music.
My mom wanted me to learn piano in second grade. I lasted about a year before losing interest. Then in fourth grade I picked up the saxophone, and that was different. I fell in love with it. I wanted to be a jazz performance major. I wanted music to be my whole life. By high school I was playing in rock bands and getting into everything I could.
But there was a second thing pulling at me the whole time. My dad was a mechanical engineer, so there was always some of that in the house, and I was the kid who took things apart to see how they worked. When I was around a mixing board, I realized something about myself: I didn't want to just turn the knobs. I wanted to build what happened underneath the turning of the knobs. I wanted to be on the deeper level, where the actual thing was made.
That instinct showed up most clearly in loudspeakers. In high school I started building my own speaker boxes. My dad had woodworking tools around the house, and I'd watched him use them, so I made the enclosures myself and went and bought the cheapest, most awful drivers you can imagine, Radio Shack, tiny piezoelectric speakers, that kind of thing. Most of it sounded terrible. But I learned an enormous amount about how sound reproduction actually works, and I learned it with my hands. That was really the beginning of my hardware journey.
When it came time for university, I couldn't choose between the two loves, so I didn't. I did a double degree at the University of Miami, music, plus electrical engineering and computer science. That combination is unusual, and people would ask why. The answer was simple: I wanted to bring great entertainment experiences to people, but I wanted to do it from the technology side. The science of how a performance reaches an audience was as interesting to me as the performance itself.
I've since worked on satellite imagery, humanoid robots, and brain-control interfaces, and none of it feels like a departure. It's all the same question I was asking as a kid building speaker boxes in the garage: how do you take something you can imagine and actually make it real, in the physical world, well enough that it works?
If you're young and you feel pulled in two directions, the artistic one and the technical one, my honest advice is don't force yourself to pick. The most interesting work of my life has lived exactly in the seam between those two things. Learn to build what's underneath the knobs.