Why Audio? Exploring Purpose

Sound has been the thread that has woven through the fabric of my life. What is it about this most fundamental of human senses that has captivated me for over four decades? Sound may be a universal experience, but the way we each engage with it is deeply personal. In this essay, I’m exploring the intersection of sound's collective power and our individual needs—and how bridging that divide could transform the way we connect with each other.

Planting the Seeds of Passion

From my first days, music and sound played a central role in my life. As a toddler, I could mimic complicated songs. There’s a well-known, now lost, family recording of me at two-and-a-half, singing show tunes from Oklahoma!—a sign of my early connection to melody.

As I grew, my Aunt Bev, a professional flutist, exposed me to the arts, fueling my interest. By fourth grade, I began trumpet lessons, eventually switching to lower brass like the arcane euphonium and better-known tuba. In eighth grade, I struck a deal with my parents—if I got all A’s on my final report card, I could begin drum lessons. That deal marked the beginning of my love affair with drumming and drums.

Drums Ignite the Flame, Tech Focuses it

Drumming opened a gateway for me—not just to music, but to an obsession with the gear. I wanted to know what made drums sound the way they did, how to manipulate those sounds, and I was captivated by the mechanics of the hardware. This fascination led me to pursue a career in music products. However, after an internship with a leading manufacturer, I became disillusioned with the conservative, nostalgia-driven world of traditional instruments. I realized I didn’t want to spend my life reissuing vintage ones with slight tweaks; I wanted to innovate and impact how music was created.

That led me to audio technology—recording and live sound—where I found a faster pace of change compared to the centuries-old tradition of stretching animal skins over logs. From there, my passion for music production, sound reinforcement, and audio experiences grew. For the past 20 years, I’ve strived to advance the art of making and experiencing sound for both creators and listeners.

Throughout my career, I’ve worked in various audio fields. My work has always focused on customer-centered innovation—finding new approaches in sound to better solve users’ problems. This includes musical instruments, studio recording and processing gear, live sound equipment, home audio systems, headphones, gaming headsets, podcasting software, music mixing and mastering plug-ins, and communication technology for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people.

So why have I devoted my entire adult life to sound? In grad school, while pursuing my MBA, I saw classmates who were Finance Bros (pronounced fuh-NANCE), making far more money than I did, but doing work they had no passion for—or even despised. But I’ve never felt the desire to leave the world of sound for more cash, and I’ve never attempted to dissect what keeps me from believing my work will ever be done in this domain.

Universal Connection

Sound is a universal human experience. We hear before we see, taste, smell, or feel. For all of human history, it has been one of our first experiences—hearing our mother’s heartbeat in the womb, her voice, and our surroundings. This deep-rooted connection also drew me to work supporting those who are Deaf or hard of hearing. My startup, Auxbus, donated a percentage of revenue to fund cochlear implants and speech therapy for children with hearing impairments. While I’ve since learned more about the cultural complexity of this approach, my belief in the power of sound to connect us has remained.

Even people who can’t hear can often feel sound. Low frequencies resonate to make music not just an auditory experience, but a tactile and visceral one. Unlike other media, sound has physicality. You can’t feel a blog post, photo, or video. But sound? We feel it deeply within us.

Embracing Differences

Recently, I’ve come to realize that my lifelong interest in sound might be tied to my neurological makeup. I’ve written about recent struggles with anxiety and depression. Through the course of treatment, I sought a formal neuropsychological assessment. We all exist along the autism spectrum, and I had developed suspicions about certain characteristics fitting Autism Spectrum Disorder profiles. Ultimately, I did not receive that diagnosis, but instead, ADHD.

Learning this about myself—something I’d never contemplated in four and a half decades—has made aspects of my mind, personality, and preferences make more sense. Extreme hyperfocus oscillates with periods of frustrating distractibility and sensitivity to certain stimuli, especially sound.

I’ve always had strong preferences for specific sound qualities, character, volume, and content. Noise is chaos to music’s and engineered audio’s relative order. And, would you look at that: the field I find myself dedicated to is about the organization of manipulation of sound.

Assistive Audio

During times of anxiety and depression—states I’ve learned may be symptoms of unmanaged ADHD—I’ve found myself extraordinarily sensitive to certain sounds. I’ve found that assistive technology, like my noise-canceling AirPods Pro, is a valuable tool to manage my nervous system’s visceral response to dissonant or undesirable sounds.

That tracks with my history. I’ve been a drummer for years, surrounded by loud transients and abrasive high frequencies. Since high school, I’ve worn custom-molded earplugs—something my bandmates rarely understood.

As the father of two young children, I often feel overwhelmed by their joy and excitement, which lead to sounds that, though normal for most, can feel overwhelming to me. It breaks my heart that their playful noise sometimes forces me to retreat to a quieter space or lash out with a raised voice and subsequent regret.

Not Just Me, All of Us

Ultimately, I think my interest in sound has to do with the intersection of its universality and developing our ability to control it. It is behind some of the few experiences we share in culturally collective way, yet our preferences for how we experience it are unique.

In modern life, we’ve lost many shared cultural experiences that once connected us, as so much of our entertainment is individualized—streaming services, personalized playlists.

We don’t all watch M*A*S*H* at 9 PM on Monday. We time-shift, skip commercials, fast-forward, watch it at 2x with subtitles, and virtualize surround sound—even if that’s not what the producers intended.

Collective Personalization

But live events like concerts, plays, or speeches are among the few opportunities for us to come together and experience something collectively and synchronously. We submit to the old-fashioned experience of seeing, hearing, and experiencing the same thing with our neighbors at the same time. We can’t skip the commercials, we don’t get to turn the volume up and down, we don’t get to skip the songs we don’t like, and hopefully we aren’t scrolling on our phones during the performance.

If I’ve learned anything, it is that hearing is a profound gift. Experiencing sound, whether heard or felt, is universal to humans, but differences in hearing ability, neurological differences, and preferences all exist.

What if we could merge the benefits of collective experiences with personalization? Imagine attending a concert with 70,000 people but having the ability to adjust the sound to avoid pain, muffling, and ringing ears. Or attending a speech where the sound is optimized for your individual hearing profile, rather than unintelligible, boomy, or incoherent. This personalization could help us all participate more fully in shared experiences, and I think that would be pretty good for society: for us to spend more time with each other without the discomfort.

I also dream of a world where anyone, regardless of their background, can express their creativity and artistry through sound. A world where creating sound experiences doesn’t require years of training or technical expertise.

What Does it All Mean?

So maybe for me, it’s about making sound—the most fundamental, universal human experience—accessible, enjoyable, and meaningful for everyone. Ensuring everyone can participate in the world of sound in a way that respects their preferences and needs. Enabling ears and minds to listen and speak with dignity.

And that, my friends, sounds a lot to me like making the world a better place.