My musical journey started when I was 10 years old, first learning to play the guitar. I ended up starting college in a music business program, but after three semesters, I found myself craving more of a challenge. I pivoted to physics, as I have always obsessively asked why and how things work; in this case the universe (the reason for the name: 1st YT channel name "Fermionic Games" slowly condensed over the years to "FERM"). I kept playing music on the side, being the subject I'm most innately drawn to. Eventually I found myself working in a corporate lab in NYC for several years, until covid turned everything upside down. Being out of a job and having to move back to my birth state of Florida, I turned my focus back to music. That's when I began doing live streams to react to whatever music people were willing to send in.
The question that always resurfaced in my mind was: What makes for 'good' music? Of course we have the music fundamentals of pitch and rhythm, but the vast range in people's preferences, and emotionally charged responses (positive or negative) to certain songs or styles always fascinated me. More importantly though, I believe, is the question of what makes the distinction between a piece of music that grips you and one that doesn't at all, regardless of popularity. The obvious path to understand this is through neurology, psychology, and the nature of consiousness. However, we seem to be very far from truly comprehending these relationships. But, with the rapid advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence, we now have powerful tools to make sense of the virtually endless amount of music and audio data that we've amassed on the internet, which is bound to continue to unveil fascinating insights into the nature of music and audio.
Today, I use AI and machine learning to explore these intersections, to build tools that demystify complex audio concepts for creators of all levels, and help bridge the gap between hearing and feeling the music, and understanding why it sounds the way it does to us. The only people that truly have a profound understanding of this are the highly trained and experienced professionals in the industry, and even they couldn't reliably explain it to the average person; it largely becomes a learned intuition. My hope is to help connect the dots for artists that don't have extensive experience in audio engineering and music production, to help them better understand the music they create.