The room

The current studio sits in Keene, New Hampshire — a working room organized around several stations so that any instrument is reachable inside the span of a single idea. Nothing is stored away. Nothing needs to be patched in before it can be played.

A thought can travel from hand to recording in under a minute, which turns out to matter more than any piece of equipment in the room. Mobile recording rigs make it possible to capture moments wherever they happen — the music does not have to wait for the studio to be ready.

What it’s for

The studio is the source room for the recorded work, for Doctor Body, for the soundscapes performed at The Clearing, and for the ongoing weekly programs at UCC Keene. It is also, on any given afternoon, simply a place where Alison and I make music together — and increasingly.

The principle

“My current studio relies on analog and retro-tech — a creative sanctuary where intuition and craft take priority over convenience.”

The studio is deliberately built to resist the affordances of the modern DAW. No quantization. No precision recall. No total integration between instruments. Most equipment is manual, much of it vintage, and the gestures required to use it cannot be undone with a keyboard shortcut. These are choices, not constraints — and they exist for a single reason: to keep the agency, judgment, and risk of the music in the hands of the person making it.

A thirty-year practice in composition and a parallel career in machine listening and music AI sit behind that choice. The point is not Luddism. The point is that the work I want to make is the work that has my fingerprints on it, captured in the moment of being made, with every decision audible in the result. The studio is the apparatus that makes that kind of capture routine rather than rare.

The instruments

Catalogued sparingly on purpose. The studio contains, in broad strokes:

A beautifully restored 1923 Steinway grand, the anchor of the studio.
A working collection of late-1970s and 1980s analog and hybrid polysynths — the era when synthesizer design was still figuring out what it wanted to be, and the instruments still bear the marks of that uncertainty.
A generous modular system built around current and classic formats.
A small set of contemporary flagship synthesizers chosen for what they do that nothing else does.
Vintage Japanese FM and additive workstations from the period when digital synthesis was first sounding like itself rather than like a copy of analog.
Outboard processing and live-capture infrastructure distributed across the room’s stations so any signal path is two cables and a thought away from being recorded.

The full list is not the point and is not published here. If we work together or perform together, you will see the relevant instruments in context.

Machine listening, music AI, and the manual studio

I have spent the better part of two decades building machine-listening technologies and, more recently, AI creative assistants for music. Technology patents, a music-technology startup, ongoing consulting work in AI music generation and recommendation systems. The studio is what I make for myself because of, not in spite of, that work.

“Ask not if AI can create, but whether AI-generated insights and materials can become the foundation for fully realized musical works by humans. Spoiler: yes they can.”

The position is not that AI is a threat to music; it is that the more powerful the tools become, the more important it is that the human work — the decisions, the gestures, the captured-once performance — has nowhere to hide. A studio built around manual instruments and live capture is the honest test bench for that position.

“Authenticity in art is not some verifiable truth embedded in the art object itself. It’s an aesthetic effect — the perception of sincerity that’s cultivated in the listener through skill and intent.”

The studio is one of the places where that skill and intent are practiced.

From the cabin to Keene

From 2021 to 2026 the studio lived in a cabin in the remote White Mountains of New Hampshire. Wood walls, low ceiling, deep acoustic treatment, no neighbors, no outside noise — by any technical measure an ideal listening environment. Five years of work happened there. The room shaped the music made inside it in ways I am still unpacking.

But the cabin asked a particular kind of life of the person living in it. The studio there was a project studio — most of the equipment had to be stored and pulled out for each session, because there was not room for everything to live in the open. Winters in the wilderness are not a metaphor; they are a logistical condition. Every bit of warmth and comfort was earned. Self-reliance was the operating principle, and silence — the silence, and the dark sky, and the felt connection to weather and to the physical world — was the reward.

What the cabin could not give was people. Regular collaboration. Live audiences. The kind of music-making that only happens when other musicians can stop by for an afternoon. That is what Keene is for.

The new studio is the same instruments and the same principles, reorganized for accessibility and for collaboration — Alison is in the room far more often, others can join without requiring a wilderness expedition, and the proximity to the sanctuary at UCC Keene makes the connection between the studio and live performance a matter of a few blocks rather than a few hours.