Aaron Lanterman
David Bowie said: "If you feel safe in the area that you are working in, you're not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting." Most professors become experts in a particular research area and then propose graduate special topics classes in that area. My alternative approach is to make time to learn things that I want to learn by proposing to teach l special topics classes on those things. This lead to the creation of my classes "Analog Circuits for Music Synthesis" and "Guitar Amplification and Effects," as well as my Vertically Integrated Project team, "Retrofuturistic Hardware: Music, Gaming, and Computing." After tracing the origins of these classes to an Apple 2 computer, a Sequential Multi-Trak synth, and a 4-track Tascam Portastudio that came into my teenage hands and pondering how the Covid-19 pandemic led to me becoming an accidental YouTuber, we will explore the musical potential of Field Programmable Analog Arrays based on floating gate transistors being developed at Georgia Tech.
