Starting as a poet, I learned about the sounds of words with David Abercrombie. Then, remembering my background in physics, I moved to studying acoustic phonetics and speech synthesis. From there I learned about psychology and how. to test perceptual theories. A meeting with a physiologist led to work on the use of the respiratory muscles in speech. Later I landed in Africa teaching English phonetics and learning about African languages. When I went to UCLA to set up a lab I was able to find bright students who helped make computer models of the vocal tract and taught me linguistic theory. And I was able to continue wandering around the world, describing the sounds of a wide range of languages.