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Before the beginning there was a place somewhere between being a worker in their organization, and becoming a worker within my own.
And it wasn’t too long ago that reality collided with a dream.
In 2018 I started using JUCE. I had already gone to school and vaguely remembered C++, but JUCE opened the doors to full-time C++ programming.
I used to get fits of anger because what I wanted to do — make music software — was constantly interrupted by everything surrounding it. None of it was really here nor there, but somewhere buried in inheritance diagrams, API calls, and DSP code stitched together from libraries of preconfigured algorithms.
At the time I already had a steady job and was making a decent salary. The team I worked with was laid back. We’d show up, hang out for an hour catching up, and then spend most of the day doing whatever we wanted.
And honestly, after working through hell in failing restaurants during college, I knew I had it pretty good.
But the job was dead-end.
There was no upward growth. No real responsibility. And if I’m being truthful, we didn’t contribute very much.
Around that time I started reading books and listening to talks about becoming a successful CEO, and one thing became very clear: there’s a trajectory most of us follow in life and in business.
There’s a beginning, where we depend on others and need help.
There’s a middle, where we provide for others and contribute through whatever work we choose to do.
And then there’s the end — the golden years — where we slowly begin depending on others again.
I fiddled around with different ideas before settling into audio. Maybe video games. Maybe web development. But underneath all of it, I loved music.
And when I realized music was ultimately just people putting two and two together — algorithms, mathematics, millions of samples stitched into sequences — it became obvious that it was simultaneously mechanical calculation and something far beyond it.
Something human.
We’re not supposed to cry at the sound of a bass drum. And I’m fairly certain we don’t.
But we do cry when we feel another person’s pain transcribed through writing, spoken word, or music.
And that shit is real.
There’s an unparalleled duality to it all. We can say “don’t blink” or “don’t listen,” but if a sound exists, then it was heard. And if it was heard, maybe it was listened to.
Yet somehow we never really know what another person heard, or whether they listened the same way we did.
So the story goes: we are caught somewhere between boring mathematics and beautiful deception through music.
Did you hear that?
Did it sound the same to you?