Helicopters circled overhead. Police sirens blared. Our peaceful town had been transformed into a war zone. The worst part was that I knew that if an intruder barged in the door, I could not protect my family. I couldn’t even stand up. This was during the Covid riots of 2020, and it happened to coincide with a period of my life where I was injured and confined to bed for nearly a year.

A few months earlier in January of 2020, I had flown from to Kauai. I immediately got food poisoning, probably from something I ate while traveling. After a few days I thought I had recovered. Then, one day when I attempted to use the bathroom I felt a pain I will never forget – a pain so intense I was screaming at the top of my lungs and crying with tears running down my face at the same time. The pain is easy to describe, but difficult to appreciate on paper. Imagine a serial killer is stabbing you repeatedly with a serrated carving knife. I knew something was wrong and that it was serious, but I didn’t know exactly what. After what seemed like an eternity the pain subsided.

Then things got worse. Later that day I experienced another attack, this one out of the blue. I quickly learned that these attacks could come at any time throughout the day at random intervals. There was no warning and sometimes no apparent trigger. I went to the emergency room on the island but they were not able to correctly diagnose my problem. I didn’t know how I was going to function if this problem persisted.

When I got back to L.A. I met with a surgeon who was able to diagnose my condition. Its something that’s embarrassing to discuss. Millions of people suffer from this condition and the world needs to know about it. Even Gandhi wrote about it in his autobiography.

I had something called an “anal fissure”, tiny tear that causes intense muscle spasms. I describe it as hell on earth. The surgeon believed the food poisoning I’d had in Kauai may have contributed to it. The surgeon said she could operate on it, but I risked having permanent side effects for the rest of my life. Should I get the surgery and risk permanent injury, or should I wait and hope it gets better? I decided to wait.

As the surgeon predicted, I did not get better, even with various medicines. I decided to go ahead with the surgery but now another problem arose. Because Covid was in full swing, all non-essential surgeries were prohibited. Now I could not get the surgery even if I wanted to.

I couldn’t stand up long enough to brush and floss my teeth. I would brush my teeth then lay down until I regained my strength enough to go back to floss my teeth. I couldn’t make an entire sandwich. I’d get out some bread and put on the mustard and mayonnaise. Then I would lay down and recover for a while and come back to put on the cheese and turkey. Most importantly, I could not work.

I rarely saw the outside world at this time. While everything was falling apart due to Covid I had little direct experience of this. For at least six months I didn’t even cross the street. The only time that I really saw the outside world was when my wife drove me to visit the surgeon and talk about my issue.

Laying down in bed was simply the safest place for me to be. I generally didn’t feel pain in this position. I could concentrate for long stretches of time. My body didn’t work but my mind and my hands still did. The only thing that I could do effectively without pain was operate my computer. My normal profession, tuning pianos, required hours of standing and was simply not possible. I had to find a way to support myself and my wife. It was a desperate situation.

Fortunately, I had one possibility. The year before, I had created a computer program called Composer Bot that could write music automatically. I had presented an early version of Composer Bot at a music-industry conference. A friend of mine named Vickie Nauman had invited me to be a panelist at a seminar about AI and its potential effect on the music business. Little did she know that I had created a music-generation program of my own.

When my music was presented, I expected the competition would leave me in the dust. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. After my music, a piece from Sony was played. The audience burst out laughing. Sony’s music was so awkward and juvenile that, in contrast, my modest compositions sounded like Beethoven. I knew then that I had something.

Now, lying in bed unable to tune pianos, Composer Bot looked like the only way out. So for the next few months, I lay on my back and did the one thing I could do—program.

Every morning I woke up and immediately began coding. Often I had several hundred lines of code done before breakfast. Composer Bot is a program that writes music automatically. It is not AI in the sense that it does not learn. It does not ingest thousands of pieces from other artists and try to emulate them. Instead it uses numerical settings to describe different genres and melodic styles. Everything in Composer Bot can be reduced to a number. Happy? That’s a number. Sad? That’s a number. Fast? That’s a number. Slow? Also a number. I already had a basic prototype of Composer Bot, I just needed to expand its capabilities so it could generate more complex music.

My goal was to create large amounts of music and publish it to music libraries which I already had relationships with. These companies would in turn license those pieces to film and television.

My other goal was to write a piece for symphony orchestra with Composer Bot. After just a couple of months of programming Composer Bot had written its first composition for symphony orchestra called “Atlas”. I intended to email the parts to an orchestra in Hungary to record it. I had never used these musicians before so I thought it would be a good idea to test out the players first.

Therefore I had The Bot generate another piece for strings only called “Icarus”. I spent only about ninety minutes dialing in the settings for Icarus on Composer Bot. I clicked the button and the piece was finished in just 4/100ths of a second. The next day the orchestra would perform it. I’d spent months in bed barely able to move, slaving away building this machine. What would happen? Here is the result:

I was very satisfied with Icarus so I sent the parts for Atlas” to be recorded.

I was still incapacitated but laying on my back I was able to record music on the other side of the world. This was certainly one the strangest, scariest and at the same time most exciting times of my life. Every few minutes I would call my wife into the room, giddy with excitement, to hear the latest music the program had written.

These two pieces as well as numerous others really started to generate some buzz. People contacted me to do interviews. I was able to secure a contract with one of the biggest music publishers in the world. Rolling Stone magazine interviewed me twice. A director friend shot a movie about me and Composer Bot which got into numerous film festivals.

Eventually with two surgeries and physical therapy I was able to make a full recovery from my injury. It took about a year to recover from the major symptoms and probably another year to become fully active. I could now walk, run, surf and most importantly take care of my family. That time seems like a dream now. How can life be so light and so dark at the same time? I don’t now. Somehow although I felt like I was hanging on by a thread financially, physically and emotionally, I managed to create something that has profoundly changed my life even to this day.