From 1989 to 1991 I worked in a local music store running the department of sound reinforcement. Eventually I got the opportunity to design a sound system for a small church, but I soon found that the aspect of choosing and locating speakers was far from easy. After reading a couple books on the subject, it became clear that the math was way over my head. The basic problem was that speakers possess directivity, and if a listener is at a location where the speaker is not directly aimed, the level will be reduced. But finding the amount of reduction seemed like a tortuous problem reserved for the mathematically elite. So I took night classes in Algebra and Trigonometry, and after a lot of work, I was able to hobble along somewhat with a programmable calculator.

But then I encountered another problem. The music store wanted to be reimbursed for the time I spent designing a system. At even at a modest $20 an hour (a handsome profit for the store after deducting my $6/hr), most small and medium churches were reluctant to make the investment. So my new-found skills mostly sat on the shelf, and the sound systems were built without the needed insight that I could have provided.

Yet I deeply loved what I was doing, so I attempted to pursue it. Major consulting firms told me that to get any further I would need a certain piece of paper--an engineering degree. While I hardly wanted to take a four-year detour, I knew that the education would come in handy, so I began school majoring in mechanical engineering. It was there that I discovered that I was one of those people that simply enjoys solving problems with calculators (geeks). Four years later, I had almost forgotten the world of sound that had inspired me to enter school.

When I graduated, I took a job with Caterpillar, and they placed me in a peculiarly familiar environment: Acoustics and Vibration. The world of decibels and frequency was reopened before me, and I fell in love with it all over again.

The church where I was attending and serving as a sound operator was having some complaints about the sound--it was usually excessively loud, bright, and poorly mixed. In a rare display of insanity, I thought, "I can tackle this." So I sat down and drew pictures and wrote equations. But now I was armed with the powerful mathematics software package Matlab^® (by the MathWorks, Inc.). Weeks later, after implementing the equations in code, I started to model the sound at my church. I soon discovered the basic problem: The sound operator--that is, me--couldn't hear anything! The board had been stuck up in "the crow's nest" where I could hardly see the speakers let alone hear them. The settings that resulted in decent sound for me were wreaking havoc on the ears of my audience.

As I started iterating through alternative designs, an enlightening thought occurred to me: I wasn't using engineering math anymore. The process had been reduced to entering coordinates and running the analysis. I could have done this years ago at the music store without the engineering degree if the tools had been available! Then, in another rare display of insanity, I thought, "I could implement this stuff in a Windows application so that anyone can use it."

After a bookshelf of programming manuals and two-hundred pages of C++ code, WinSound™ was born. As I showed it to everyone I could find that was crazy enough to try to use it, it became evident that few churches were reaping the benefit. And, in another rare display of insanity, I thought, "I should publish WinSound so that every church at least has the opportunity to benefit from it"...working on it...