"Speech by day, Art by night"

I divide my time between my speech technology company (see About the Artist) and art pursuits. In the course of pursuing my two passions, art and speech, I have become fascinated by the similarities in how humans perceive objects and sounds. In both cases, the observer (viewer or listener) uses similar types of cues (intensities, textures, shapes, contrasts, sizes, etc.) to integrate the visual or auditory signals that enter his/her eyes or ears into meaningful “scenes”, where a scene might be a landscape or a sentence. Whether I am creating a picture with paint or speech with a computer, I must produce the appropriate cues through which the perceiver will be able to determine my intended message—the objects, the focus, the mood of the scene. Speech and art for me are synergistic endeavors. What I learn in one area I often apply to the other, as I discuss in more detail in this 2015 interview (at time 7:42). Thus while I’ve only been painting with a brush for twelve years, I feel like I’ve been painting most of my adult life.