In the summer of 1989, I took the Music Animation Machine to Los Angeles to show it off. I set it up at a house in Hollywood and started inviting people over. One of the people who came to see it was the artist and animator David McCutchen:

He’d done many films of animated music. We formed a partnership with the aim of selling animations to recording companies (and, later, collaborated on his animation Flat Out, in which the bar-graph scores of the music animation machine are transformed from a flat, static image into a twisting, whirling highway).

A side-effect of this was that I got the necessary hardware to record my animations onto videotape. I recorded hundreds of custom tapes and sent them to my friends, relatives, and others I thought would be interested ...