E-Mail This Article to a Friend Changing tunes (continued)

SITTING IN HIS tiny, tidy bedroom studio on the fourth floor of a stately Beacon Street brownstone, while the blue of the John Hancock Building pierces the gray sky outside his window and a fat cat named Buddha sniffs at the strong coffee and Lindt truffles he’s served, Somunkiran talks about his arrival in the United States. Back in Europe, he’d had a very successful career as an attaché at the Turkish embassy in Hungary. But he was restless. "Everybody thought I was crazy," he says. "I don’t know what this is really called in the United States, but you know when you go to the US embassy in another country, there’s the ambassador and there are people who deal with commercial matters. They advise the ambassador. That’s what I did in Hungary. For many people, it’s their dream job. Diplomacy. You get your paycheck every month. But I figured that music was what I wanted to do."

It’s no wonder: Somunkiran is a tremendous talent. He’s equally adroit at guitar and keyboard, but it’s in composition and arranging that he truly shines. On his Web site (Somunkiran.com), you can listen to a track like "Strange Company," a moody meditation that incorporates modal jazz, electronic loops, snatches of robotic rhymes, and atmospheric effects. Or a gorgeous symphonic piece like Bosphorus, performed by the Berklee Performance Orchestra, which, as its title would suggest, takes cues from both Eastern and Western musical idioms. All mournful, minor-key woodwinds, sweeping-swooning strings, and dizzying harp and xylophone, it evokes the portentous chill of a rainy, windswept night, and could easily be the soundtrack to some noir thriller set in Eastern Europe.

Sitting in front of the tools of his trade — a PC with two hard drives, a keyboard, a guitar synthesizer, an amplifier, a sound interface — Somunkiran explains that when he applied for, and won, the Berklee Entering Student Talent scholarship, the decision was automatic. He immediately headed from Ankara to Boston with his wife. "It took me some time to get used to Boston’s weather, I have to tell you that," he laughs. "But I like the city a lot. The fact that it’s very small, but still very colorful, very diverse. Everything, I like." He’s not sure if he’ll stay here for good, but he may. At any rate, he knew he had to come. "I figured, if I don’t do this now, when I turn 60 I’m going to ask myself, ‘What if? What if I did it?’ Everyone has his own dream career, and I’m happy that I found mine."

As he sets out to make his mark on the American music biz, Somunkiran takes courage from the trail blazed by two fellow Turks, Ahmet Ertegun and Arif Mardin. Ertegun, born in Istanbul, in 1923, founded Atlantic Records, in 1947. The son of a Turkish ambassador to the United States, he was entranced by the music of the American South, and was especially taken with Ray Charles, whose first records he released. Atlantic has since been home to everyone from Aretha Franklin to Led Zeppelin, and Ertegun is one of the most powerful and influential men in the history of rock music. Arif Mardin, also from Istanbul — and, like Somunkiran, a Berklee alum — was Atlantic’s in-house producer and arranger, presiding over classic albums by the Rascals and Dusty Springfield. (Since branching out on his own, the biggest feather in his cap is Norah Jones’s Come Away with Me.) Clearly, these men had much to teach an aspiring musician and producer.

"When I graduated from Berklee College of Music, I wrote [Ertegun] a letter," Somunkiran says. "I didn’t know him. I didn’t have any connection that would lead me to him. I didn’t know really anything about the music industry. Two days later, I get a call and it’s his secretary. ‘He wants to talk with you.’ " He pauses for effect, then his voice rises to make the magnitude of the moment clear. "This is a guy who is in Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I’m talking to ... the history of pop music. I was so excited. He said, ‘Whenever you have a chance to come to New York, just visit me, I want to talk with you.’ The next week, of course, I was in his office in Manhattan."

The two spoke for hours, with Ertegun offering practical advice about the workings of the music industry. They also spoke at length about their homeland and its political and economic situation. "It’s a very common thing with Turkish people, they have to save the country," Somunkiran says. "Even if they know nothing about politics or economy. They try to find the solutions. So that’s what we did." (He may in fact have helped his country’s economy, at least indirectly: some of his jingles have aired on Turkish radio.) Somunkiran came away from the meeting in awe of Ertegun’s commitment to the craft. "He still listens to every CD that comes through his office," he marvels. "He said, ‘People don’t do this anymore.’ That is a fact. And that is a sad fact, too, because people invest a lot of time and energy in these CDs, like they are their babies."

WHETHER OR not Somunkiran can turn his own babies, these strange and satisfying software programs, into something bigger remains to be seen. But in the few months since their launch, CoolSpool, Rave-X, and Habanero have been catching on worldwide. Somunkiran points to some review pages he’s printed up from shareware sites in Korea and the Netherlands, and notes that Rave-X has been downloaded in Russia and Germany. He’s been seeing about 20 to 30 downloads per day. Not bad, for something he just started marketing last month.

Closer to home, the programs are catching on, providing the music at parties on college campuses and even supplementing DJs’ turntables. One user e-mailed to say that CoolSpool is "totally hypnotic!" Another wrote that "we’re having a little party here tonight and just decided to give our jukebox a break [so] we fired up Rave-X. This thing sounds amazing ... [it] will definitely be a part of our parties in the future." One New York City DJ asked for permission to use Rave-X in public. "I’m looking for ways to incorporate computers into my rig," he wrote. "I only need to run my laptop straight thru the club’s PA, and who knows, maybe that’s all we’re ever gonna need in the future, no turntables or anything."

Robert Bloodworth, for one, thinks Somunkiran is the kind of guy who can make this into something bigger. "I think he should contact Microsoft and see about getting this bundled in with their operating system," he says. "Whatever he puts his mind to doing, if he runs into a roadblock, he’s going to find a way around it. He’s very determined. He has a lot of talent and a lot of skills."

As you might expect of someone who’s released three versions of this software in as many months, Somunkiran is already at work on a new prototype. "Right now, [the technology] only comes with the loops that I’ve entered into it," he explains. "But I’m working on a new version that will allow the user to import their own sounds. Ultimately, my vision of this is that one day you’ll be able to purchase a CD and you’ll be able to play around with the sound in it, [make] several versions of the same song. You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be able to visualize, and hear it in your head. If you know what you want to play, you’ll have the technology to do it."

Might this be the beginning of a sea change in the way we apprehend music? "It can certainly be done," Somunkiran says. "People want to be able to manipulate music, play with music. Pretty soon, everybody will have the ability to do this, and make it sound really professional. In three or four years, people are going to be so used to this that it will not be possible to impress anyone with good production anymore. They’ll say, ‘My six-year-old can do that.’ "

Download trial versions of CoolSpool, Rave-X, and Habanero at Sessionx.com. Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com