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He studied music as a youngster playing piano, woodwinds, and violin. However, the siren song of science caught his ear and he, perhaps wisely, decided to pursue physics as a career (actually astronomy, the other non-paying profession, but having had lots of computer experience, he can now afford a Kyma system!).
However, music is still a burning passion and especially electronic instruments capable of producing unnatural sounds.
David first started using synthesizers in the early 1980s at the same time as getting diverted to software development in Forth, Smalltalk, Lisp, and ML. He worked with Lenra Studios, where they made one of the first, albeit small, attempts to completely automate the soundtrack production for documentary films. DSP knowledge was later obtained in a big way while working for the Intelligence Services, specializing in geolocation by means of radio signal correlation, and untangling Faraday rotation effects of Earth's ionosphere. There David worked mostly at 10 MHz sample rates, so the 44.1 KHz in the studio was a breeze!
"A physicist, astronomer, compiler writer, mathematician, and amateur musician describes me best," says David. "My latest language system, called NML, is useful for image processing and ad-hoc numeric modeling, but it also includes some CSound-like capabilities." Free source-included copies for the mathematically inclined can be had from http://dmcclain1.home.mindspring.com/
