Guitar Dreams

After college, Freed landed his first job as a computer programmer in Paris, and because of his technical skill, he soon found himself employed by Pierre Boulez's IRCAM – hired there by David Wessel, who was the director of pedagogy at the time.

Freed's time at the French institution was his official introduction to computer music. He tried his hand at recording a couple of songs that he'd written on guitar and then transcribed into keyboard music, but he soon became frustrated. He didn't feel he had the training to advance his musical ideas very far, and everyone around him had been playing an instrument for longer than he had. He decided to focus his technical skills on helping musicians, and wrote the first program to let artists do sound editing and mixing on a general-purpose computer, called MacMix (later licensed by a German tape-recording company).

But Freed hadn't forgotten about the instrument that had piqued his interest as a teen. He began studying acoustic guitar – decidedly outside the realm of computer music – and is still taking lessons and attending guitar camps. (He says he tries to keep his musical pursuits away from his better-trained colleagues at CNMAT.)

At work today, Freed is better known for his expansive tech knowledge and his foresight in the field of computer music. "Adrian is certainly a more reclusive character [than Wessel]," says Ali Momeni, a former CNMAT grad student. "He's very independent-minded. Super, super sharp. Frighteningly sharp – a walking encyclopedia."

"I'm constantly in a dream state," Freed adds, in what at first sounds like a contradiction. "I don't have a dream. I live in a world of potentialities. I'm constantly thinking about the world as it will be."

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One day about five years ago, with guitars still on his mind, Freed posted the thoughts and questions he had about the instrument on CNMAT's Web site. He titled the page "Guitar Innovation Group." Several items on the list were related to digitization.

A few months later, Freed approached Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of Gibson Guitars, with what the researcher considered an obvious idea begging to be realized. Juszkiewicz, who had worked with CNMAT in the past, says he had also been thinking about building a digital guitar, and he agreed to give CNMAT about $100,000 per year for four years (matched by a state grant in partnership with the University of California) to develop prototypes.

Freed and about a half-dozen other researchers and grad students began building forerunners of guitar pickups and the computer chips that would eventually go inside the MaGIC. Simultaneously, whiz-kid programmer Matt Wright began designing new guitar effects for the not-yet-created instrument (for example, a less muddy fuzz box effect, and one that can simulate a human voice on the guitar strings).

Despite CNMAT's detailed work on the MaGIC, the product's design and development was done at Gibson's labs in Sunnyvale: Freed still hasn't seen the final version of the instrument. Besides, Freed and his colleagues have already moved on, their attention now directed toward producing a 120-channel speaker-amp combo and more new guitar effects.

CNMAT will likely never see a dime from any of the products Gibson develops out of the organization's ideas, but working with a world-famous guitar company has benefits beyond funding: Gibson's connection to industry and consumer markets allows CNMAT to reach a wider audience than it could access from its ivory tower.

Though he's not entirely comfortable admitting it, Freed recognizes that a digital guitar like the MaGIC solves a problem that has vexed him since his childhood: It allows him to be the musician he always wanted to be – to combine the nuance of playing an acoustic guitar with the fantastic sounds he made when he was a kid fiddling around on a synthesizer. In a way, by opening up the realm of musical possibilities for other musicians, he has opened them up for himself.

"I'm actually pretty close to saying, 'Yeah, I can take this guitar around and play it, maybe do a few gigs,'" Freed says. "I'm actually at that point that I dreamed of way back. ... Though I'm not a good player, I'm spending time with people at CNMAT, I'm spending time learning an instrument, and I'm interested in pushing things further ..."

Freed, who usually prattles on, has suddenly drifted off.

Soon he looks up and apologizes. "I was dreaming again," he says sheepishly. "As I was talking to you, I thought of another way to play the guitar."

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Like his office, Freed's computer desktop is a mess. But he quickly navigates around it, eager to locate video footage of a local musician demonstrating the Gibson digital guitar.