Audio / Music Work
I've been playing piano, organ, and keyboard for some 25 years, and have naturally been drawn to the production and engineering aspect of music and voice. I'm fascinated with how particular sounds support the meaning of a song and affect the listener, and how to get the "best" possible sound from performers and voice artists using the environment and tools I have available to me.
My home studio has grown to include a number of synthesizers and other instruments, a dual-monitored Macintosh-based Protools DAW, a couple of nice large diaphgragm microphones (including an Australian tube condenser mic), and several outboard effects boxes.
During my years in undergrad, I co-produced three amateur music albums, providing all the arrangements and orchestration with my keyboards and MIDI equipment.
During my time in grad school, I provided original music scores for a number of award-winning student films. Since then, my band has had an album produced by Nashville producer Michael Quinlan (Rebecca St. James, Benjamin Gate), and later I headed up the engineering and production of my band's self-produced 11-song album.
In my spare time, I find myself poring over one of the many music magazines I subscribe to, studying up on mic placement techniques, theories of audio compression, ways to get "the best" out of a voice artist or vocalist, aspects of sonic space and mixing, and so on.
For the past few years, I've been doing voice user interface (VUI) work -- designing the flow and script for voice applications, helping defining the "grammars," and then going on to record and prepare the "prompts" included in those applications. I've completed some speech application courses with Nuance, including an intensive one-week Advanced Dialog Design course on-site in Menlo Park, California.
A typical project involves developing the "dialog design" and ensuing script based on the client's requirements, working with developers to specify the grammars,
coaching and recording the voice artist, editing and preparing the final audio files, and then going on to tune the application after the prompts are in place. Voice applications I've worked on have been related to travel, credit card, banking, and training programs.
It is a thrill to hear one of the applications I've worked on, listening to how seamlessly the system concatenates the various phrases in such a way that the inflections sound very natural. Dates, amounts, and locations, for example, sound fluid and natural, as though the phrases were spoken live rather than pieced together on the fly. Such results are achieved through upbeat and conscientious coaching of the voice artist and meticulous editing (down to the phoneme, in some instances) of the audio files.
I've put some photos of my studio, as well as songs my band has recorded, on this page.
I scanned in the manual for my Korg Prophecy keyboard, which is available here.
