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Ray Bennett, an architect at McCarthy Hammers Architects in Dallas, went to architecture school on a music scholarship. And though he was aware of similarities between the two arts, that was the most direct link they had in his mind until he was inspired by a Rem Koolhaas lecture on the topic.

"The lecture was on a Thursday night," he said. "By that Monday, I had the program completed. It didn't take me very long to do, but it took 20 years to come up with the idea."

"The idea" was that he could run the numerical values that his Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) system assigned to songs through AutoCAD, and see what the songs look like when rendered. The program he wrote to do the conversion, which he calls Alchemist, won a 2002 AutoDesk iDesign award.

"I've got time in the X value, pitch in the Z value, and then pan, where the instrument actually sits in the orchestra, in the Y value," he said.
He can play keyboards; he can design buildings; and now he's linked the two. But Bennett is still looking for new challenges: "I'm teaching myself to play guitar," he said. "It's not going very well at the moment."

By Kevin Lerner