My Story - Dean Wallraff
Last Updated on 10/02/00

At Catalina, my main interests were music and physics. I went to the U of A, majoring initially in physics and continuing to play trumpet in the Tucson Symphony. I was a negligent physics student, flunking one core course because I went to class only two or three times. I was required to take ROTC, but never went, and flunked that, too. At that time, ROTC was required for male students, and I came close to being thrown out of school because of this, which would have put me in the Vietnam-war draft pool. Through an incredible stroke of luck, the ROTC requirement was abolished exactly when I flunked it, and I stayed at the U.

Sometime during my sophomore year I read Will Durant's book about ancient Greece, and fell in love with the ancient culture. I switched my major to Classics, and had a lot of catching up to do, since I'd studied no Latin in high school. It took me three more years to graduate, after I'd read a lot of beautiful Greek and Latin poetry. Today I think of Will Durant as too simplified (even at something like 8,000 pages for his Story of Civilization series) and to contrived stylistically, but it was Will Durant's Story of Philosophy (which was a best seller in its day -- can you believe it?) that got my father interested in philosophy, which became his profession. He was a philosophy professor at the U of A.

I moved to Montreal right after college. I'd decided I wanted to be a writer, writing novels about various cultures, and that I'd start out in France. Montreal was a good place to learn French, which I did, via a succession of small language schools and tutors, and a French girlfriend. I wrote most of an epistolary novel based on the life of the poet Vergil but never finished it. I tried to get a job teaching Latin at a European secondary school. After a few months, when money was getting low, I found that, to my surprise, it was pretty easy for me to get a contract job doing computer programming.

In the fall of 1974 I wanted to move to Paris, but decided to spend the winter in nice, warm Tucson before going Paris in the spring. I'd been back to Tucson the year before for Christmas, had bumped into Benita Bike at a Christmas party, and found her attractive. So the first thing I did when I got to town was call her up and ask for a date. "Dean who?" she said. "No, I'm busy tomorrow...and the evening after...and the evening after." So we went out on the next Monday night to dinner at Casa Molina on Campbell, and the rest, as they say is history. We got married in Tucson in June, and I never moved to Paris.

We moved to Boston instead, partly because my sister lived there, mostly because Benita, who had a small modern-dance company (and still does, over 25 years later), decided that Boston was a good place to run such a company. I got a job as a computer programmer, working on systems for large New York banks.

After about a year, Benita dragged me to an open house at MIT, which was down the street from where we lived in Cambridge, and I fell in love with the computer music studio. They had an amazing system that could synthesize sound from algorithms written in a special-purpose programming language. I asked for a job. They asked to look at some of my computer code. They hired me, and I worked there as a Technical Instructor, mostly doing programming on one of the first visual score editors for music. I composed music using their system, always in non-standard tuning systems. It was slow work, since it took the computer half an hour of calculation to generate a minute's worth of sound, which was then played back from disk. Some of my music was released on records.

After a year and a half, I decided it was time to leave. The work was getting repetitious, and the pay was low. The big problem was that I would miss the studio's system, which was the only way I could make music in my non-standard tuning systems. I decided to build my own digital synthesizer, which would let me compose at home, and would generate sound in real time. We moved to New York at this time, into an apartment in an Italian section of Brooklyn. Benita studied dance and I worked my day job, developing funds-transfer systems for Chase and Citibank, and my night job, designing and building my synthesizer.

It took a lot of work and money to build the machine, so I decided to make a business out of it. I named it the DMX-1000, and the company Digital Music Systems. I was the first advertiser in the fledgling Computer Music Journal, and, before long, I'd sold a machine to a university computer music studio in Milan, Italy.

We got tired of living in such a crowded city. Benita and her partner Lyric Sears did a search to decide where they'd like to set up their dance company and school (Tucson? Los Angeles? Boulder, Colorado?), and we ended up back in Boston in 1980. I kept on doing contract programming for big banks while I ran DMS, and hired our first employee to actually build the machines. Benita and I rented two floors over a restaurant and bar in downtown Boston, and spent every spare moment for the next year renovating them. On the bottom was her dance studio, where she taught dance and exercise classes and held company rehearsals; on the top was Digital Music Systems. I gave courses during the next two summers in the use of the DMX-1000.

We sold dozens of the machines during the next few years, to university computer music studios and research organizations. It was the most flexible real-time synthesizer you could buy at the time, and it allowed composers to do things they couldn't do with any other affordable system. But Yamaha introduced the DX-7 in the mid-80's, which provided more raw synthesis power (though less flexibility in programming) in a unit that cost a tenth the price of ours. I spent a year or so trying unsuccessfully to raise money to develop a new generation of synthesizers, and then got out of the business.

Over the next few years, I held a series of jobs developing computer systems for big banks: running a 20-person project developing a wire-room system, CEO of a company selling wholesale funds-transfer software, consultant on a trading-floor automation system. This was getting to be too much the same thing over and over. During this period I decided I'd like to try making my living as a composer.

I'd been writing music all along, mostly scores for Benita's dance works realized on the DMX-1000, sometimes with added performers. I saw two choices to make my living composing music: become a university composer or a film composer. I've seen enough of university life to know that I can't stand the insularity or the politics. I'm more comfortable out in the hustle-bustle of the "real," commercial world. So I set up a studio in Boston and tried to get gigs doing music for documentaries and commercials, but I found out that it's hard to run such a business in Boston because so little film and video is actually produced there.

So in 1990 Benita and I moved to Los Angeles. Or rather, I dragged her here. She was pretty well established as a modern-dance choreographer in Boston and didn't want to give up her position to start over at the bottom of the heap. But she did, and it has taken her a decade to become as well known in L.A. as she was in Boston. I wrote the scores for several shorts and documentaries, and for five feature films in the first years after we moved here. The features are: Casting Agency, a comedy about a Hollywood casting agency, Lukas' Child, a horror film where the monster in the basement must be fed scantily-clothed young ladies at regular intervals, Sounds of Silence, a film starring Eric Estrada, where the protagonist inexplicably wigs out, Four-Day Shoot, which is about a southern minister who is ostracized because he decides to make an R-rated film, and Kane and Abel, portraying two brothers, a gangster and a lawyer (which is the good one and which the bad?). If you should see one of these films in the video store, don't rent it.

I never got the knack of marketing myself as a composer. A lot of it is done through personal connections, and I'm uncomfortable with the hypocrisy of making friends in order to get work. I also found out that there's an oversupply of composers in Hollywood: not even Academy-award winners are getting all the business they want. So I got out of the film-music business.

I got into what I'm doing now indirectly via music. I started working on a multimedia CD-ROM version of Homer's Odyssey. I wanted to include the original Greek text, some English translations, a lot of images of Odyssey-related artwork of many kinds, from Greek vases to Chagall, and audio performances of certain sections of the text, spoken with musical accompaniment. I was contacted by the NBC producers of the Hallmark miniseries starring Armand Assante who wanted something to give out in schools to promote their show. I used this connection to try to get a publishing deal for the title, and failed. But the experience taught me a lot about the problems publishers face in promoting their products.

As a result of this, I started hyperDrive.com, which is an Internet retailer of learning, children's, games and reference software. Its focus is on quality titles from smaller publishers that don't have widespread distribution (though we carry all the mainstream stuff as well). We've also started a net marketplace for wholesale software called SoftWare Market (http://www.swmarket.com/) which we envision becoming a hub for the software industry, connecting many distributors, publishers and stores, big and small. One of the purposes of these two companies is to level the playing field, to make it easier for the smaller publishers, distributors and retailers to connect with one another and promote quality non-mainstream software. Another purpose is to increase the efficiency of information flow in the software industry, saving everyone effort and money.

The year 2000 finds me living in Shadow Hills, a rural part of Los Angeles, with Benita and our two white German shepherds, Nemo and Zuma. I play the piano (I gave up the trumpet when I graduated from college), write a dance score from time to time, read a lot, am an amateur photographer, and lead Sierra Club hikes around L.A.