Free Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robison Page B

and whined and pleaded relentlessly until my parents bought it for me. I was full of ideas for integrating my stash of former television pieces into the Showman amplifier my grandmother had bought me.
    My ideas worked. My Fender amp got louder, a lot louder, and it began to sound hotter. I took it to some local shows and had the musicians play it against their own amps. It ran circles around most of them.
    “Man, this sound is hot!” Musicians were quick to praise my work. I had a winner.
    “Hey, can you do that to mine?” became a common refrain after someone played my equipment, so I started modifying amplifiers for local musicians, and they told other musicians. I also started fixing broken equipment.
    I began to understand the relationship between my design changes and how things sounded. Musicians saw that.
    “Can you make the bass snappier?”
    “Can you get more definition in the low notes?”
    “Can you soften the overdrive sound?”
    With a bit of practice, I became able to turn the words of a musician into technical descriptions that I used in my designs. For example, “This sound is fat” translated to “There’s a lot of even-harmonic distortion.” And I knew how to add even-harmonic distortion on command.
    Soon the musicians and I moved from changing the sound of the amplifier to creating entirely new sound effects. In those days, reverb and tremolo were the only effects available to most musicians. I began to experiment, producing new effects, new sounds.
    I also began experimenting with transistorized circuits. The Fender amps were tube technology—designs from the 1950s. Transistor circuitry was newer, and integrated circuits were state of the art. By studying the circuits, I figured out how to make little battery-powered special-effect boxes. I worked hard to imagine the results of my designs, and I refined my thought process as I visualized a circuit, then built it for real, and compared my imagined results with the real results. Gradually, I became able to visualize the results of my designs with a fair degree of accuracy. My earlier problems with math texts stopped holding me back as I developed the ability to visualize and even hear the flow of sounds through my circuits.
    At that point, I had made several key breakthroughs. First, I had gained an understanding of the electronic components themselves. They were the building blocks of everything to follow. Next, I somehow figured out how to visualize the complex calculus functions that describe the behavior of electronic circuits in time. For example, I saw the pure tones of a guitar going into a circuit, and I saw the modified waves—immeasurably more complex—coming out. I understood how changes in the circuit topology or component values would alter the waves. And, most remarkably, I developed the ability to translate those waves I saw in my mind into sounds I imagined in my head, and those imagined sounds closely matched what emerged from the circuits when I built them.
    No one knows why one person has a gift like this and another doesn’t, but I’ve met other Aspergian people with savantlike abilities like mine. In my opinion, part of this ability—which I seem to have been born with—comes from my extraordinary powers of concentration. I have an extremely sharp focus.
    I spent my free evenings at local concerts, and became part of the scene. Club owners, bouncers, and even bartenders began to recognize me; musicians talked to me and everyone seemed to respect me. I felt good about myself, and I felt even better when I discovered that many of them were misfits like me. Maybe I had finally found a place I’d fit in.
    This was a relief, because the situation at home was deteriorating. We had been seeing Dr. Finch for a while now, and my father certainly treated me better, but my parents’ fights with each other were still brutal. And both of them were going downhill fast. My father was drinking more than ever, and he was depressed