Johnny Turpin is a multidimensional engineer, tinkerer, musician and visual artist currently residing in his home state of North Carolina. After graduating from NCSU’s college of engineering, he decided to explore life in Silicon Valley, working as a hardware engineer at Apple Inc., followed by a short stint designing music and sound effects for the video game industry, followed then by an exciting shift to what would become his passion: software design, developing one of the industry’s first ever time-line based drag-n-drop DVD Authoring applications (before drag-n-drop was really “a thing”).
After 12 years in California, he decided to give the 24 hour creative lifestyle of New York City a chance, where he was a member of local favorite indie rock band, Seems So Bright, while also working for a small software consulting firm designing multimedia applications for many Fortune 100 companies. After enjoying 5 crazy years of the NYC lifestyle, and accidentally stumping his toe on a piece of cracked sidewalk outside his apartment in Brooklyn one afternoon, he decided it was time again to experience the joys of a grass yard, dogwood trees, and muscadine grapes. The triangular nationwide 20 year journey was complete.
With more time to do things like sit on a porch browsing the internet looking for interesting things for engineers to tinker with, he stumbled across a laser projector for sale, and started exploring the possibilities of using audio synthesis concepts to design a laser drawing shape generator (synthesizer) application which would be as simple and fun to use as a standard sound synthesizer - with an easy and fun interface, lots of knobs to twiddle, and immediate results. The application is called “Maxwell”, and Johnny will be giving several workshops at Moogfest 2017 discussing the challenges of imaging user lasers, different approaches, and hands-on demonstrations with multiple workstations running Maxwell. He will also be giving a live collaborative performance with synthesist, Chris Ianuzzi.