When I first created the artist name, I really, really, really, had no place making any music. I chose the name "Artificial Wonders" as a gigantic personal goal to force myself forward.

Double edged sword. There's more sub-par now, but definitely more above-par, too. It also makes the first step to getting yourself heard much, much easier.

Is this a trick question? Yes and Yes are my options. I think I'm going with the double yes.

2006 - Picked up the piano for the first time in 7 years.

2007 - A friend of mine convinced me to get into digital music. Later that year, I made a song I called The Rain Part 3, and I began to look at changing my career path.

2008 - After the failure of one of my game projects, dubbed Retribution (or the project name, RETA3), I met with someone interested in my music, who wanted to do a remake of Tower Defense. Unfortunately the game never launched, but it was my first completed OST.
A couple of months later I met with someone who goes by Haven Harbinger on Skype, who approached me with the idea of making a psychological thriller that at the time we called MIND. We later scrapped the idea and called it AURA.
Inbetween MIND and AURA there was a small gap that I felt I had to fill, and was dead-set on my career path to involve at least some form of music. So, I did a strictly musical redo of RETA3, calling it RETA4, and it had some of my best tracks that I had ever composed to that point. It was at this time I felt a need to move on from the ever limiting typing-to-MIDI keyboard function of FL Studio 8 and get a real keyboard, being the M-AUDIO 61es.
After AURA officially began, the 'musical hole' came up again, and I started the biggest and last musical re-endition of Retribution, calling it simply RETA5. Some of the best tracks that came out of it were "Rapture", "The Rain Part 3 Redux", "They May Be Worthy Redux", and "Fallen Warriors".
AURA A1 was largely focused on synths, fast paced rhythms, and very little orchestration, which I think was largely why I felt the need to do RETA5. The general swath of tracks for the first attempt at AURA was also, regrettably, largely uninspired.

2009 - AURA was put on hold musically during a little creative downturn I had in January, but, thankfully, FAWM2009 got me back on my feet and composing like no tomorrow. I had somehow managed to compose an imaginary film/story in the span of 28 days, containing exactly 14 tracks. Considering it was largely "organized improvisation" (particularly given the timeframe), a few of the tracks I was genuinely happy with, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the finished product as a whole.
After FAWM2009, I began to start looking at getting serious hardware that would let me max out my creative potential over a longer period of time than the last upgrade (the last upgrade lasting only a mere 5 months), so, I chipped in, accumulatively, $1000, for: a new processor(Intel Q6700 (quadcore) 2.67ghz), EWQLSO Orchestra Silver Complete PLAY Edition, lots of optical cables, a Harmon/Kardon receiver, new headphones (still somewhat disillusioned about proper monitoring at that point, but still, not bad), as well as an LS-10. I have yet to need anything more, and it's long past the 5 month mark.
Using the new hardware, I (blindly) rushed into AURA A2, throwing down tracks left and right, and although they WERE inspired this time around, very much so, they were still extremely rough around the edges and the attention to detail that I had spent so much of on RETA5 just wasn't there until the bitter end of AURA A2.

Mid-late 2009
It was at this point that I had caught onto the fact that Haven had stopped contributing to AURA and, I started AURA A3 without him. But not before meeting Chris Fewell, which in a word, changed my life on a musical level that I had never experienced. I now had a grasp, and a sense of purpose when I created a track, and the track itself almost felt like it had a conscious - that it knew where it was going. And I love it. I can make a track that is genuinely "catchy", and separated from the "organized improvisation" that had plagued me before. I have yet to find anything more satisfying than music itself.

Present - Early 2010
Packed my bags and left for Nashville. Currently learning music theory while Chris puts a band together.

Daisuke 'Pixel' Amaya (Cave Story. Get it. Now. Free. Go.)
Bladiator
Cirque Du Soleil
Jerry Goldsmith
Carl Orff
Daniel Baranowsky
Vangelis
Denny Schneidemesser
Mago Del Oz
Pink Floyd
Pixietricks
Sixto Sounds
Zircon
Nobuo Uematsu
Robyn Miller
Kenji Yamamoto
Bobby Prince
Minako Hamano
Yasunori Mitsuda
Dave Wise
Noriko Matsueda
Koji Kondo
Big Giant Circles
Vassilis Tsabropoulos
The Wingless
Chris Geehan
Dan Byrne McCollough
Jeremy Soule
Alexander Brandon
Mazedude
Avien (RIP, you talented bastard)
Tommy Tallarico
DarkeSword
The Fat Man
Jack Wall

Operating System:
Windows 7 64-bit

Software:
-FL Studio 9
-Cubase LE4
-EWQLSO Silver
-Audacity V1.3
-Oh and, hell yeah to ASIO4ALL.

Preferred VST's:
Crystal Soft Synth (free)
Solo (free)
Sophia (free)
STS33 (Wouldn't ya know it? It's free.)

Hardware:
-GIGABYTE EP45 UD3P motherboard
-Q6700 processor (OC'ed to 3.3ghz, quad core)
-3GB RAM
-M-AUDIO Keystation 61es
-M-GEAR Sustain Pedal:
-LS-10 (Epic recorder)
-PSW10 Sub (Mixing equivalent of a car stereo)
-Durabrand surround sound speakers (Mixing equivalent of a car stereo)
-harman / kardon AVR 154
-ATH-M40fs Precision Studiophones (Reference monitors)
-ATH-M50s (Primary monitors)

"Any good melody is like an old friend you haven't seen in a while."
-Unknown