Music as a Chariot

Foreword

In the summer of 1988, I had just completed an undergrad degree in electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University that also included a fair amount of classwork in acoustics and music theory. I was set to start grad school in the fall, also at Purdue, to study acoustics in the School of Mechanical Engineering. But, as the summer progressed, I began to question my plans and bounced between a fascination with acoustics and engineering and a deeper desire to explore the more creative aspects of music and audio.

Tension between the analytical and the expressive, between things engineered and things created, was not entirely new to me. An influential and prescient teacher in my senior year of high school summed it up in a note on ...