of Microprocessors

I think you can see that I have a special fondness for the K150FS and indeed true synthesis of all
types. I really like to start from nothing when making a sound rather than modifying something
existent. I mostly putter around and don't do much with sequencers; waiting for that large block of
time necessary to undertake something serious.
SONIK : Who have been your musical influences?
HAL : I have always liked Bach fugues and classical organ music in general since being a little
kid. I once got into trouble climbing around the pipe room at my church taking pictures and
examining how the various parts worked.
I never really embraced pop music although there were a number of tunes from the 50's and 60's
by the Beach Boys, Del Shannon, and similar groups I could relate to. After getting a BS in 1970
though I basically tuned out nearly all pop music, which had become too disordered and loud for
my taste. There were exceptions though, like the Moody Blues and The Who.
I'm probably not alone in revealing that Switched On Bach by (then) Walter Carlos had a
substantial influence. Before that one might say I used my rig primarily to scare the neighbors and
amuse the cat, but afterward I saw that my hobby might actually have some career potential
outside a B movie set.
More recently I'm into Vangelis, Toto, Yanni and a few other more obscure "new age" composers.
My all-time favorite album is probably the soundtrack for Dune. And some of the Korean classical
and even pop I'm bathed in every day now isn't bad!
SONIK : What would be the funniest/strangest things that you have seen in the music industry?
HAL : The weirdest experience at Kurzweil I can recall happened late at night around 1993 when I
was trying to find the source of a low, but audible in a totally quiet room, hum in a prototype
Mark-10 piano. Another engineer and I had been swapping boards and cables and trying various
grounding experiments most of the evening without a whole lot of luck. After making a small
change to the MIDI I/O board, we turned the unit on and after about a minute it started playing
itself!
What we heard was eerie but very musical and we sat listening for several minutes. After much
speculation, we concluded there was a bug in the software (which is natural for hardware folks)
that caused it to play portions of the demonstration songs at random. But on further listening that
really didn't fit either.
Eventually we discovered that a wire in the MIDI in cable had opened and was "floating" thus
feeding semi-random bits to the MIDI interface. I really wish I had a recording of what came out
of that unit that evening.
SONIK : You have a unique perspective of intellectual property issues for musical digital signal
processing, because your book predates the granting of many patents in the field which are
considered by some to be controversial. In general, do you think the US Patent Office does a good
job in granting musical digital signal processing patents?
HAL : First, I am not a lawyer, certainly not a patent lawyer. That said, my opinion is that it is far
too easy to get a patent. Patents should not be granted to practitioners who are merely doing their
jobs unless that work product shows extraordinary insight or creativity.
Patents are routinely granted nowadays for the solutions to problems so obvious that students in an
engineering course would be expected to arrive at a similar solution had the problem been posed