Were you an electronics hobbyist as a child? Did you build crystal radio sets and fuzz boxes and hang out at Radio Shack?
Not really. For an academic art historian, my father was quite the handyman — good carpenter, plumber, car mechanic, basic household electrical — and these were the skills he tried to pass on to his kids. He was never happier than when something broke down or got clogged up. I got a toolbox for my sixth birthday, and on Sundays we repaired appliances, built shelves, and went to the dump instead of church. I think my having learned to solder and patch together a component stereo were, for my father, the most impressive achievements of my very expensive college education. In high school I briefly tried playing electric guitar (I was terrible, even for a 13-year old), which got me interested in electronic sound. I bought an old used Tandberg reel-to-reel tape recorder and discovered a hidden switch, accessed by a screwdriver through the back panel, that when thrown set up some kind of undocumented feedback loop from output to input — adjusting the volume controls while recording manipulated weird, totally un-Scandinavian shrieking oscillation, further modulated by head echo (3 speeds!) and tape saturation limiting — very cool. I was hooked. I have a theory about the rise of American homemade electronic music: it involves the Signetics NE/SE566, a chip I became aware of in 1972 in my last year of high school.
When did you make the jump from simple analog circuits to the world of digital electronics?
