The experimentation that I do has a lot to do with tunes and pitches and ways that melodies are put together.

There are, however, composers whose music can only be heard in a chromatic sense. George Perle, for example, wrote pieces that you might think of as leaning in a tonal direction but it's very hard to register a pitch as, say, the sixth degree of a scale, whereas in much of my music I think that's often relatively easy to do.

Even today, I notice that some of my pieces are explicitly tonal; there are actually tonics and dominants. And then there are pieces that are not tonal. I tend to think that there's a dichotomy that has to do with the way pitches are structured.

I've had a lot of fun writing percussion music. It feels quite similar to writing computer music. But I found myself in the role of choreographer in a way, worrying about physical movement and such.

With repeated listenings, a piece eventually becomes its own being. I very often say to students that this is like meeting a person for the first time. When you first meet someone, you reference that person with others who are similar; but, as you get to know that person better, you begin to understand his unique qualities.

I noticed things in my computer music that were getting old, and I started to figure out that this has to do with the way the listener interacts with music.

I was very fortunate to be at a wealthy institution. I do recognize the drawbacks and limitations of the academic world but it's basically the world I grew up in and there's no way in which I would have been able to survive in the so-called real world.