young. I think the first live music he took me to was Duke Ellington . Sitting front row during the show and getting to meet Duke, and some of the guys in his band, Cat Anderson and Johnny Hodges was so exciting. So I grew up hearing a lot of great jazz, a lot of great big band music. And then later got into rock and stuff on my own in my teen years. So music plays a really big role in my life. I think you have to do all of this with music in mind. Otherwise you're just making widgets. Here at UA it's music widgets by people making music. So that's neat. Did you have any formal music training? I was in the electrical engineering department at Stanford, but I was based at CCRMA (Center for Research in Music and Acoustics), which is part of the music department, so I was around a lot of composers there and took music classes. It's always been a fairly serious hobby for me. Is there anything you think was particularly good about being at CCRMA? CCRMA has produced a lot of important technology for music. I think it's the people, from the professors to the students. It was the first place I was in my life where music and music-related technology was taken very seriously. At the time there were only a few places that would let you do media-related things at a graduate level. When I was looking at