Early years

I demonstrated aptitude and interest in music at an early age. At age 5, my parents bought me a tiny electronic keyboard which I would play with constantly, plucking out tunes I heard in church or at school or on the radio. Since the beginning, my talent has been dictation (the memorizing or transcribing of pitch/rhythm patterns), although I did not learn to write notes on paper until much later. My ability to recognize and reproduce patterns accurately has assisted me in the areas of language, mathematics, and computer science.