Dr. Dave Livingston
The Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man.
This site serves multiple purposes:
Since I’m just getting started content will be sparse, but come back periodically for updated material.
Back in the late 60’s, I was tasked with the question of which elective course I wanted in my sophomore year of high school. Having taken art the previous year, I decided I would take art again, but upon receiving my schedule, I found I was enrolled in electric shop. Sticking with the shop class, my first project was a continuity checker. Meeting the requirement of writing a project report on how it could be used, I discovered the continuity checker was ideal for testing my guitar cables for shorts and opens. With the realization that I built something electrical that was useful to me, I became infatuated with electricity and electronics. I subscribed to a couple of electronics magazines and used my free time to build electronics projects including an analog music synthesizer.
At about the same time, I would to go to the public library (long before the internet was a thing) to find books to placate my desire to build things. I found a couple of books: one on how to build mobiles and one on Alexander Calder, the inventor of the abstract mobile. Thus, I began my personal study of creating mobile sculptures, which I did during the last couple of years of high school and my freshman year of college.
I began my study of electrical engineering with the desire to become an audio engineer. During my undergraduate studies, I was exposed to computers and my interest in them grew to the point that the emphasis of study became computer hardware design. I was further encouraged by my eventual advisor to enter the Masters program, where I designed a co-processor for my thesis, and eventually entered the Ph.D. program.
After completing my coursework, but before my dissertation was completed, I joined IBM Endicott, where I was on the team that developed two models of the IBM PC: the IBM PC-XT/370 and the IBM PC-AT/370. After these projects were complete, I finished my dissertation and upon defense and graduation, I returned to academia and started my career as a professor of electrical and computer engineering. I taught and did research at three different institutions of higher education for 34 years. The research interests I developed during my academic career include embedded systems, artificial intelligence, robotics, analog and digital electronics, and their applications to visual art and musical signal processing.
After retiring from academia, the free time that comes with retirement enabled me to refresh my interests in mobile sculpture art and tinkering with applications of AI to digital art. I also continue to experiment with the design of music effects, specifically guitar effects pedals.
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Contact: drdave@ai-art-music.net