Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
118 M PS E . O R G Charles Maynes MPSE: Jeff, could you give an account of your life path prior to working in audio professionally? JB: I grew up in Bexley, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. I was lucky to be OK at school, started piano lessons at 5 (but didn't go too many years), and was curious about how some things worked, and took some of them apart that I usually couldn't put back together. In my early teens, I wound up playing clarinet in our school band for a while, but by around 15, I started playing guitar and taking some jazz lessons. Eventually, in high school, three friends and I kept busy playing for dances and even OSU frat parties and I'd sometimes play guitar in the school orchestra and the musicals our high school put on. In my last year of high school, my physics teacher, Mr. Hughes, chose to take me (and not the much better students) to Bell Labs, where the transistor and laser were invented. This experience led to my deciding that physics might be for me. After high school, I applied and was accepted into the Case Institute of Technology in 1966, and over the years, found I most enjoyed experimental physics, optics ,and acoustics. I can also proudly say, up to that point, I never ever touched a computer there (1966-70). Back then, I could never fathom why anyone would create and run punch cards, which, if the programming didn't work, required a new batch of punch cards to get a program to run, and if not, it required repeating the processes endlessly until it did. By my third year at Case, I helped put together an 8-piece band called "The Same As Last Week" which not only played for college dance parties, but had an agent booking us in bars and other venues around Cleveland—and in summers, did 1- & 2-week gigs near Chicago and elsewhere. The point of mentioning this comes along shortly. After graduating from Case, I half- heartedly looked around for grad schools, but took the summer to tour around UK and Europe (and decided on arriving in London and seeing a guy on a Triumph motorcycle, to get one), instead of "InterRail" tickets. Having no plan or motorcycle experience, that summer taught me how to be pretty self-motivated and to learn you can make decisions when you need to and that "things will work out." Once I got back to the States, I think I had enjoyed being in a band so much, that I decided to take some piano lessons and try to write music with friends. I also got a job teaching science in a Cleveland junior high school to make money initially, but I also met an unbelievably talented young lady named Pam, and formed a band to earn money playing while working on songwriting. BUT, I also made a primitive "home studio" where we bounced tracks between two stereo tape machines to build up vocal and instrumental parts. We had reverb in our PA amp and I had a fuzz-tone and wah-wah pedal. This was 1971. After sending our demo tapes everywhere, we did get two contracts to record with "big name" organisations, and although the songs were good musically, they were deemed to not be "commercial" enough and NOTHING HAPPENED!! So I decided that since I did not have any idea how to do better, that we split up—Pam got into Berklee School of Music and I looked around Europe for maybe working at an electronic music studio. In the quest, I did find a PhD program at the University of Surrey Physics Department which had an acoustics department, but I would need to pay for it. But something else mysteriously appeared out of nowhere. The people at U Surrey told me that the University College of Wales, Cardiff Physics Department, had an opening for a Tutorial Fellow in the acoustics group, where they would pay me to help with labs while I did a PhD. And it was open to me [this might have been because the professor in Cardiff knew my professor at Case, but I never found out]. So with that, I accepted the Fellowship, packed up my stuff and sailed to the UK on a student fare on the SS Queen Elizabeth 2 with my guitar, amps, big tape recorder, and clothes. When I got off the ship on 1 Oct 1973, I rented a car and got a map so I could find out where Wales and Cardiff were. Cardiff turned out to beautiful around the University, and the Physics Department was full of clever, quirky, delightful physicists and students, and it was wonderful for me. Finally at 26 (still in 1973), I touched my first computer—a DEC PDP-8/I 12- bit minicomputer and my first program (entered on the switches on the front), made the panel lights blink on and off every second. I started to enjoy programming and could save programs on paper tape. After about a year of poking around, I got interested in how the human auditory system worked when detecting directions by sound. I devised experiments to measure human high frequency (>4kHz) sensitivity varied as a function of sound source elevation, by using a tiny spark as a "point source" speaker. From those measured curves showing that the listener's pinnae filters their sensitivity with elevation, I found I could simulate the auditory illusion of a sound moving up and down from a fixed speaker by putting an octave of noise through a notch filter Punch cards. Photo: José Antonio González Nieto