Even as a very young child, I was driven by my curiosity. I always needed to know how things worked and was constantly conducting my own little experiments to satisfy that curiosity. While my experiments and research never led to any Nobel Prizes, as they did for Dr. Pauling, my lifelong curiosity and my ongoing search for answers has certainly brought me a great deal of happiness over the years.

I was born into a U.S. Army family at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, and my early life as an army brat was rather nomadic, living in Kentucky, Texas, Germany, Indiana, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, Virginia, and Kansas, all by the time I started high school. In later years, I lived in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Oklahoma, Virginia, Georgia, Texas, and California, and now reside with my wife Jenny in the beautiful port city of Setúbal, Portugal. The fabulous arched structure you see in the photo at the top of the page is a section of the ancient Setúbal aqueduct that was built in the 15th century to bring water into the original walled city.

I began playing drums at the age of 10 and was playing professionally by age 16. For the last 50 years I have worked as a professional musician, composer, arranger, orchestrator, and music producer. In addition to playing drums in various rock and club bands, I performed for nearly 30 years as a professional orchestral percussionist, including thirteen years as Principal Percussion of the Oklahoma City Philharmonic. My compositions and orchestrations have been performed by numerous professional and university ensembles, orchestras, and soloists, and a recording of my work for microtonal piano, All the Pretty Colours of the Rainbow was released by acclaimed Los Angeles pianist and electro-acoustic musical artist Aron Kallay on MicroFest Records. In addition to my classical compositions, I have arranged and orchestrated charts for a number of popular music artists to perform with orchestra and, in particular, have enjoyed collaborating with renowned ukulele virtuoso, Jake Shimabukuro to create an entire orchestral concert for him.

Like many professional musicians, I had a parallel career as a music educator, holding professorial and administrative positions at several universities. In January of 2023, I retired as Provost and Chief Academic Officer of the University of Silicon Valley in San Jose, California, where I oversaw all aspects of the university’s academic programs, student and career services, institutional research and effectiveness, communications, strategic alliances and community outreach, and served as the accreditation liaison with the WASC Senior College and University Commission. Prior to my position at USV, I was the Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs and a Professor of Audio Design in the University of Southern California’s Iovine and Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation for four years. In that role, I oversaw curricular design and development for the program, and taught the integration of sound and audio into design and technology. My previous appointments include teaching and administrative positions in the USC Thornton School of Music, the Texas Christian University School of Music, the University of Oklahoma School of Music, and the Oklahoma Christian University Music Department.

Teaching at major research universities carries with it an expectation to conduct research, and the primary focus of my research was developing tools and the technological skills to prepare students for life as twenty-first century musicians. Consequently, much of my work involved internet-based teaching and learning as well as computer-assisted instruction. In 1999, when applications like Zoom and FaceTime were still a twinkle in somebody's eye, I developed the protocol for, and conducted the very first demonstration of, a real-time, bi-directional, private music lesson with full-fidelity, uncompressed audio and video over the advanced research network known as Internet2. The insights gained from that work led to many of the network improvements that allowed videoconference applications to develop and flourish on the public internet in later years. In the early days of videoconferencing, audio echo between the participants was a serious problem. All of the methods employed at the time for controlling echo had a horrible result when it came to musical audio content. To combat that issue, in 2009, I developed and released ECHODamp, an audio mixing and echo-control software application specifically designed for musical videoconferences. For my research in these areas, I was twice honored by Internet2 with their IDEA Award.

One of the university courses I frequently taught covered the subject of sound design and creation with synthesizers. In order to take full advantage of a synthesizer's capabilities, one needs a thorough understanding of how all the synthesis elements work and interact with each other. In the early days of synthesizers, that was fairly easy since those individual elements were often separate pieces of equipment connected to other pieces of equipment with patch cables. For today's students, however, current synthesizers are often a single piece of software with all of their inner workings tucked away as if in a black box, making it difficult for students to understand, or even visualize, how a synthesizer produces its sounds. In order to help my students better understand the synthesis process, I created a series of computer-based, interactive learning objects that allowed them to easily focus on each of the individual synthesis elements to better understand its role in the overall synthesis process. I eventually put all of that information into a book and companion website called Refining Sound: A Practical Guide to Synthesis and Synthesizers, published by Oxford University Press.

And, just in case you're wondering, I graduated from Leavenworth High School in Leavenworth, Kansas, and went on to earn a Bachelor of Music degree in Percussion Performance from the University of Kansas, a Master of Music degree in Instrumental Conducting from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM), and a Doctorate of Musical Arts degree in Composition from the University of Oklahoma. I also completed graduate coursework in Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy from the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).