maybe so... i took reza's class in 92 or 93 or so. i petitioned to take it early (as opposed to senior year) so i could attempt to apply engineering to my music.

in fact, i didn't even know where to begin. it wasn't until i went to graduate school at UCSD - a program dedicated to avant garde music - that i began to aestheticize engineering concepts.

in actuality, what i do requires no real engineering skills. but i am one of the few composers who actually understand what is happening at the signal/systems level when doing digital signal processing. really, though, it comes down to whether it sounds the way you want it to or not, and i know plenty of composers who can get computers to do what they want without having an engineering background.

other than that, i've had to do higher trigonometry to build some of my multi-channel spatialization routines... and that looks really impressive to my colleagues who stopped doing math at freshman year.

you can see what i'm doing at www.kerrylhagan.net