Bruce's formal training was in music and philosophy, after which, as a lecturer and conductor at a midwestern university, he mystified undergraduates in music history, electronic music, and orchestra.  After discovering that computers in the context of music performance don't play out of tune unless programmed to do so, Bruce soon realized that computer programming and design was not only fun, but could be made to pay.

So, he left the hallowed halls of academe for a position with a consulting engineering firm, where he gained valuable experience on projects such as a giant digital squirt gun used for injecting tenderizing enzymes into sides of beef; a digital flow-meter for the sewage-treatment industry; and a computerized poultry feeder designed to produce plump birds without feeding them to death.

Marriage and a migration to Seattle brought a position as Director of Research for a telecommunications firm where Bruce was responsible for the design of a computerized voice-recognition-based automatic telephone dialer for telemarketing use, thereby creating an unprecedented number of junk phone calls-- precisely timed to arrive during the evening meal. (There is no truth in the rumor that this was merely to create demand for Bruce's invention, heretofore undeveloped, of a device to block junk telemarketing calls.)

Realizing that the above telecommunications firm now needed blue-suited types instead of his type, Bruce quit-- dumping his stock options-- and once again became a consultant. After a series of digital signal processing projects for various audio companies, Bruce decided that the world really did need yet another audio company, so he and his partner founded a Seattle high-end digital audio firm in 1993.

After pushing digital audio bits through DSPs for nine years, and manufacturing audio gear for Hollywood, Bruce decided enough really was enough, and left to pursue other interests. That brought him back to mystifying undergraduates again.