1st Interviewee: Gordon Good
Interview Date: 3/30/22
0:02 Lucy: Okay. So can you tell us about yourself? Like your name, age, occupation?
Gordon: I’m Gordon Good. I just turned 60 years old, and I’m a software engineer at VMware in Palo Alto, California.
0:17 Lucy: So why did you choose your occupation?
Gordon: Well, I originally went to music school in college, but during that whole time I was always interested in computers. And after I graduated from music school, I needed a job, so I got a job in a computer store assembling computers, and then eventually was in the service department and doing tech support. And I finally decided to just go back to school and get a degree in it because I really enjoyed it. And it’s something I’ve always really been interested in, like since I was a kid. So that’s kind of the reason I chose it, because it was interesting and I was pretty good at it.
0:56 Lucy: What about your hobbies? Is there anything you’re particularly interested in?
Gordon: Well, I have a few hobbies. Ever since I was a kid, I have been interested in electronics. I got my ham radio license when I was 13 years old, and that drove my brother Brian crazy because at the time he was living in the basement of our parents house because he was going to graduate school and needed a place to stay. And whenever I would transmit with my ham radio, it would make his speakers go thump, thump, thump on his stereo, and it drove him crazy. But I always had a lot of fun with that and, you know, learned—learned a lot about electronics and that was sort of the basis of where I kind of got interested in that. I remember actually putting together a radio receiver kit with my dad when I was around 12 or 13 years old. It was one of those kids that you built out of individual parts and assembled, and we put it together in the basement over a course of a few weeks, and it worked. It was a lot of fun.
1:58 Lucy: So how would you say your hobbies tie into what you do for work?
Gordon: Well, I guess the hobbies when I was a kid sort of gave me the basis in the interest for what I would later study. Nowadays, you know, I spend all day writing software and fixing bugs and helping customers with problems. But it is kind of fun to unwind with a little bit of tinkering with electronics in the garage. I like to build musical instruments out of electronics. So I’ve had—made some that you sort of shake and they make noise and some that you blow into as a pressure sensor, and it plays music through a computer via the MIDI protocol. Yeah, it just kind of helps me unwind and kind of gives a different side to programing, because programing at work is very much about these very complicated systems that run customers’ computer networks and security and all of this stuff, and sort of getting back to basics and just making a light blink or colors flash on a LED string is kind of a lot of fun and rewarding because you get to see that it actually does something. Whereas a lot of times when I work at work, I don’t really see the fruits of that. It’s just one little feature within a very, very large product that my company makes.
3:29 Lucy: So what’s your history with music? Is there a type of music you’re most interested in?
Gordon: Well, I got—my earliest memories of music are listening to both my older brothers practice. They’re 9 and 12 years older than I am, so my older brother Kevin is actually still a trumpet player in the Detroit Symphony, and he was in college when I was in junior high school.And my older brother Brian is a physicist, but he’s a really good jazz saxophone player. And I remember them playing and also my—my brother’s girlfriend at the time was a bassoonist, and so our house would sound like a music conservatory with three different instruments practicing and—(laughs) funny story. My first instrument was the drums, and my parents sent me down into the basement, into the bathroom in the basement to practice because it was so loud. (laughs) And after getting tired of that, there was a—they had a trombone hanging on the wall as a decoration, and they pulled it off the wall and said, “Here, try this.” (laughs) And I was pretty good at it. And that’s—I took that up and with sort of the example of my brother’s—And also, both my parents play piano as well, my father and my and my mother. So I kind of got interested in that and had a really great junior high school band director named Jim Kirk, who really encouraged me a lot and continued through high school and then decided to go to the University of Michigan and major in trombone performance in music education there. As to what kind of music, I’m pretty eclectic. I grew up listening to a lot of classical and I would just kind of show tunes. My parents really liked things like Fiddler on the Roof and Funny Girl and other musicals like that. But I also was exposed to a lot of classical music and—and also jazz because my brother Brian is a huge jazz fan. These days, I really like listening still to jazz. I like listening to―you know, more challenging classical music. Some 20th century music. What I like to do at least once a week is to spend an hour and I’ll go on Apple Music and find some piece of classical music I’ve never listened to before. And I’ll spend like an hour really deeply listening to it. And I find that really, really satisfying. So—but, you know, I also listen to EDM and, and just about anything that, that, that you can find out there.
Lucy: Yeah. James played the trombone too, right?
Gordon: Yeah, James did play the trombone for a couple of years.
Lucy: I remember hearing that. (laughs)
6:15 Lucy: Are there any other types of art you’re interested in?
Gordon: I keep—I would love to take a class in the history of art, just kind of a broad survey of art during—when you get your music degree and when you get an undergraduate degree in music, you generally spend about two years studying music history and music history and art history are really tied together in many ways, like a lot of the periods that you talk about, like the impressionist period in art. There’s also an impressionistic period in music, and a lot of those artists and composers actually hung out together in Paris. And so to—to take a survey like from antiquity to modern in art history and to relate that back to music history is something I’d really like to do. But yeah, I’d say it’s mostly the visual arts that I’m—that I would sort of like to jump into next to learn a bit more about.
7:15 Lucy: You already sort of got into this, but what’s your history with technology, would you say?
Gordon: In music or just technology—
Lucy: Just technology by itself.
Gordon: Well, I’d always sort of been interested in it. Like I mentioned, I got interested in ham radio and I mentioned that my brother Brian was living in the basement of our parents house. He was working on his doctorate in physics at Case in Cleveland, and he bought a very, very early personal computer. And this is back in the day when they were, you know, the size of a dorm refrigerator, pretty big and not super powerful. But he was—he was using it to write some code to work on his dissertation, but he let me play with it when he wasn’t using it. And I would—I would hack it so that when he typed keys, the wrong letters would come up, and it kind of drove him nuts. But it was also a great learning opportunity. So I’d say I, I was just interested because I could figure out how things worked. And I guess that’s kind of a thing that’s kind of a common theme through my life. So I’m just really interested in how things work. When I got the job at the computer store, then the owner would let me come in to—the next door we had a computer classroom where he taught classes and he would let me, when there wasn’t a class in there, just go in and and play with the computers and learn the applications and learn how they worked. And so, yeah, I’m just kind of fascinated with how things work, just because it’s interesting.
8:45 Lucy: So when would you say you first considered combining arts and technology?
Gordon: Well, I never actually have really done that as a career. And the one thing I guess—I took a seminar over at Stanford over the summer. It was a weeklong class in building musical instruments from microcontrollers, from tiny little computers and it’s a—it’s a one week version of a class that they teach normally during the school year that’s a whole semester long. They just compress it down into a—a week long, and you know, that’s where I sort of realized that, you know, I kind of just missed the opportunity to tie music and technology together. Because there was a group at the University of Michigan called the Center for Performing Arts and Technology, which is a lot like Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, which is where this seminar was taught. But it was established two years after I graduated from college. So I kind of missed out on that. And that’s kind of one of the big regrets. I kind of wish I was like maybe five or six years younger than I would have probably been drawn into that program. But it just wasn’t available to me at the time.
10:03 Lucy: Um, so what do you think of STEM versus STEAM, which adds art, versus STREAM, which adds art and reading?
Gordon: Mm hmm. So STEM by itself—I think it’s very practical, and it, it can produce a lot of, you know, students who are proficient in the, you know, in S-T-E-M. But I think adding the arts and reading kind of humanizes that a lot. There’s a professor at Stanford, his name is Ge Wang, G-E W-A-N-G, and he teaches a—he wrote a book, a comic book, actually, called Artful Design, and where he sort of, kind of answers that question that you just asked. So if you sort of leave just STEM by itself without the art and reading and humanities, you can get technology that kind of exists for its own sake and maybe doesn’t really consider the human factors or other maybe more ethical concerns. So some of the problems that Facebook has been having lately, it’s—I think it’s pretty clear that it didn’t have that regulation of art and humanity kind of behind it. It did a lot of things just because it could, maybe not because it was the right thing to do or the or had the best benefits for everybody. So I think it’s a—I think it’s a softening element and really rounds out the technology to make it more human focused.
11:48 Lucy: All right. So are there any projects you’re working on right now? Like, for work or personal.
Gordon: One of the personal projects that I’m sort of been working off and on is—I’ve always had this fascination with like, art or music pieces that make music even when there’s nobody around to see them. And I remember seeing something called a sound sculpture, which is this elaborate contraption that would respond to wind. And when it would rain, it would so und different. Or when the sun was out, it would change the pitch of it. And I really liked that idea. But I don’t have the mechanical skills to build something like that. So I thought, is there something I can do with electronics? And what I eventually came up with is the idea of—do you know what a theremin is?
Lucy: Yeah.
Gordon: So that’s an instrument that one hand controls the pitch, the other hand controls the volume, and you get these strange, eerie—eerie, ghostly sounding things. I thought, what if I could turn my house into a theremin that was played by passing airplanes? So as it turns out, airplanes always are broadcasting in these little blips of radio transmissions that state where they are, where their altitude is, their position and their speed and direction. And you can actually read these with a simple radio receiver. So I have a project that decodes all of that and then translates that—it’s called—something called sonification, turning it into sound. So it sonifies all of those airplane inputs and makes music, and the thing I like about it is that I can turn it on and might be playing on my Macintosh in the garage and I can go away and it’s still playing there. It’s still listening to the planes and making music and you know, a lot of it is just how you choose to map the airplanes to sound. And I do it in a very kind of pretty, new agey, tinkly music kind of way. But yeah, that’s just one of those projects I’ve sort of had on the back burner for a while.
13:54 Lucy: So are there any previous projects, again, personal or for work, you’re especially proud of or you find especially notable for some reason?
Gordon: Well, the first job I had here in Silicon Valley was working for a company called Netscape Communications Corporation, and we worked on a product called the Netscape Directory Server, which is basically—it’s like a phone book that’s electronic. So you can look up somebody very quickly, find out what their email address is. And that same technology—actually, that product didn’t really do very well in the market. But the underlying technology, which I worked on, along with some other colleagues at the University of Michigan before we came out to Silicon Valley, is a network protocol now that’s used in Microsoft’s office—so if you use Office 365, underneath that, somewhere in there is kind of the work that we did or the technology that we developed. And I like that that’s getting used everywhere now. That’s pretty cool.
15:05 Lucy: Um, so are there any projects, goals or hobbies that you want to pursue more in the future?
Gordon: I’d like to do some more music composition writing. One of the things I try to do, although I don’t always do it, is just write—you know, eight bars or six bars of music like once a week, just as a kind of an exercise. And so I use a program called Ableton Live— you may have heard of that—you can, you can arrange audio clips or samples, or you can play software synthesizer instruments with a keyboard and you can arrange them all and, you know, compose them into a longer piece. So I’d like to do some more of that. I would like to, um—I’d love to take some more in-depth music history classes, like maybe focus on one particular composer or maybe some if there’s some kind of class that ties together music and visual arts, like I mentioned, I think mostly I just want to keep learning new things.