The Music Man

When he was 21 years old, a flip switched in Dan Sullivan’s brain. It was the summer before his senior year at WPI, and Sullivan was traveling around Europe as a street musician, having just completed a semester in London studying electrical engineering.

At a city park in Amsterdam, he strummed his banjo and sang a Bob Dylan song. Around him, small groups of people were deep in conversation in different languages. That is, until they recognized the lyrics. “Suddenly, everybody starts singing the Bob Dylan song, and they all knew perfect English, no accent or anything,” Sullivan remembers. “When the song ended, they all went back to talking in their different languages.”

He was in awe of the power of music to bring people together—and amazed he was getting paid to do something he loved. For decades to come, Sullivan would chase those feelings as an engineer, as he found ways to design technology to bring music into people’s lives.

Growing up in Wellesley, Mass., Sullivan spent a lot of time tinkering and inventing things in his basement, encouraged by his father, who was an electrical engineer and a mechanical engineer. He remembers plugging parts together to make shortwave radios and finding new ways to use electricity—the more dangerous, the better. “I discovered that if I took the test leads from one of my dad’s meters and I plugged them into the wall, and then plugged each end into a hot dog, it cooked in 30 seconds,” he says. “It was one of the more hazardous things I did, because I thought electricity was really cool.”

A keen observer, Sullivan was also learning some important life lessons about stereotypes in that basement. His father was a quiet, solitary, introverted man, who came across as reserved. Those traits, Sullivan came to understand, are often associated with engineers, and he recognized some of those characteristics in himself. But when he played the guitar, it drew out a different side of his personality. “I found as a nerdy, introverted guy that music was nonverbal communication,” he says. “That feeling when you’re jamming in a band, and everybody’s cooking together, it’s a great feeling. Some of the best feelings I’ve had.”

When it came time to consider college, he knew he’d pursue a degree in electrical engineering, and he applied to a number of schools—including WPI and MIT. He was accepted to all of them, but WPI sealed the deal when a college representative took the time to meet with Sullivan and tell him about the WPI Plan, which had recently launched.

“Somebody came over to my house and told me about this new program WPI was doing, where everything was self-directed, and that was really appealing,” he says. “That became my first choice.”

From the moment Sullivan moved into his dorm, he found his people. They called themselves The Wastos.

“We were the stoners,” recalls Eric Blom ’77, who also majored in electrical engineering and remains close friends with Sullivan. They were a wacky and sometimes brilliant cast of characters, who played practical jokes on one another, made music in a band called the Jugless Jug Band (“We won the talent show the only two times we entered,” recalls Blom.) and spent their free time fiddling with their own creations. One was an electric banjo Sullivan dreamed up.

For his Major Qualifying Project, he built a primitive machine made of computer chips and wires that made music when a lever was pressed. As a musician, he’d always loved the emotional side of music, and now he was learning about the science behind it. “Making musical notes, at the fundamental level, is very mathematical and oriented toward engineering,” he says. “There’s frequencies, you have oscillators, and you put things together and can shape the sound with different components.”

It was in Europe, on that study-abroad trip, that he learned a lot about life. He attended class by day at City, University of London (now City St George’s, University of London). And by night, he played his banjo in pubs, often with a French bluegrass band. “I felt more musician than engineer there,” he says.

When the semester ended, he decided to try his hand at busking with a British friend. They’d hitchhike to different cities, sleep on beaches, and earn just enough money to get by. “We would play for lunch or play for train tickets,” he says, wistful at the memory. “We went all around Europe that way—Italy, France, Germany, and Austria.”

The adventure was liberating, empowering, intoxicating. It changed him as a person. “You’re getting money for doing something that you love to do,” he says. “I just thought that was a great feeling.”

The highs of Europe became lows when Sullivan transitioned back to real life. He returned to WPI and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, but he felt stifled by structure. He moved to Santa Cruz, Calif., and drifted for a while, playing banjo in a couple of bands, including another jug band with Blom, and crashed on friends’ couches.

Eventually, reality set in, and it was time to get a job. He worked through a series of engineering roles at different companies—one created little typewriter-like devices that made music; another drew him back to Boston to design synthesizers, which were novel at the time; for a while, he worked for a ski company in Vermont, helping them conserve energy.

At a hotel, for example, guests could play on-demand videos in their rooms. At a museum, a display of 20 monitors could show an animal in motion, running through the monitors in sync. At a big box store, shoppers could view a private, in-store TV network with custom advertising.

As the business grew, Sullivan hired employees and quickly recognized that the CEO role didn’t suit him—he’d rather be inventing. “As soon as I could, I demoted myself,” he says. After about 10 years in business, Visual Circuits was realizing nearly $10 million in annual sales, when a publicly traded company made a bid to purchase it. By that time, Sullivan was proud of the business, but also ready to move on to the next thing. He accepted the offer, expecting to make millions in a stock exchange. But during the stock lockout period after the sale, the purchasing company faltered, and Sullivan walked away with a fraction of the funds.

Another low period followed, forcing Sullivan to recalibrate.

“I thought to myself, ‘What do you really like to do?’” he says. “And I went back to music.”

He designed a strange instrument that had strings like a guitar but could be played with two hands like a piano. It was equipped with infrared sensors that could detect the location of a person’s fingertips and transmit those signals to a tablet or device, creating digital notes. He called it the Zivitar. This was around 2007, and he admits the instrument was a little too out-there to attract the attention of investors. But he was onto something with the infrared sensors.

At that time, the video game Guitar Hero was all the rage. As Sullivan watched players use a controller shaped like a guitar to rack up points, he got another idea. What if people could buy a digital guitar that used those sensors (which he patented) to learn how to play music, versus just score points? This idea resonated. He found investors, hired a CEO to run his company (called Zivix) and brought in more than $1 million in a crowdfunding campaign.

Then there’s AirJamz, which is a motion-activated Bluetooth guitar pick, designed to be used as an air guitar—also known, yes, as an imaginary guitar. It works like this: A player holds the pick in their hand and rocks out. Motion sensors in AirJamz connect wirelessly to an app, so every movement makes a musical sound that works with the harmony and tempo of a selected song. The player can choose a guitar sound or 100-plus other instruments.

Commercially, AirJamz flopped, says Sullivan. But it’s been a hit among a very small segment: music therapists. “They were thrilled to see that you could make music with limited mobility, all you had to do was be able to move a hand or a limb up and down,” says Sullivan. 

He traveled around to music therapy conventions giving away AirJamz to music therapy teachers whenever he could. Teachers would report back to him stories about groups of their students, some of whom were nonverbal, using AirJamz to make music together. Sullivan found a lot of meaning in that, knowing he’d found a way to use technology to make music accessible to people. He was honored when, in 2018, the Music Therapy Association of Minnesota (MTAM) bestowed on him the Friend of MTAM Award, and in 2019, when the American Music Therapy Association presented him the Advocate of Music Therapy Award. 

At 69 and going strong, Sullivan doesn’t really think about retiring. He’s too busy coming up with new ideas. Most recently, he’s been focusing on technology that can improve the way a person sings.

Under his latest company, called Pentatronix, Sullivan customized an audio processing chip to correct a singer’s voice in real time. He developed the chip by modifying the algorithm of Auto-Tune processing software after its patent expired a few years ago. Whereas Auto-Tune works by aligning a person’s voice with a musical scale, Sullivan’s technology works by changing a person’s voice to match the lead melody track in a song.

So far, he’s licensed the chip to a company that makes karaoke machines and microphones, and he’s in talks with car manufacturers for a potential licensing deal. Beyond stage performances and carpool karaoke sessions, Sullivan believes the technology could serve as a training tool for aspiring vocalists. “If you hear yourself singing, and you hear it being corrected live, you naturally correct yourself,” he says. “It’s like having training wheels.”

Since his days at WPI, Sullivan has worked feverishly to bring more music to the world. Through three businesses, eight patents, and a whole array of inventions, he’s gleaned immense satisfaction from designing new instruments—whether they’re commercial successes, like the Jamstik, or just weird prototypes, like the Zivitar.

Often Sullivan reflects on that day, nearly 50 years ago, in that park in Amsterdam, when he realized it was possible to get paid for something he loved doing. As he looks around his home near St. Paul, Minn.—where he still has that electric banjo from WPI, along with his many other gadgets—he’s grateful he’s managed to pull it all off. “If you have a passion for something and you can get paid to do it,” he says, “that’s about as good as it gets.”