The students were missing out a lot in their ensemble playing because they weren't listening to each other or the environment.

The sound and just the fact that it was different from the piano, yet it still had some familiarity [made my fascinated with accordion].

Before that, an 8-bit recording was pixelated; it was really bad. It didn't serve what I was doing, which was recording live sound and delaying it and feeding it back. This is essentially what the EIS system is: a bunch of delays.

My mother brought accordion home. She was going to learn to play it so she could teach it and increase her income. And I got fascinated with it, so she backed off and let me do it.

I felt a challenge to compose music. That's where my challenge was, for the most part.

You invent things like algorithms to take care of some of the changes you want to make. The changes aren't detectable. There's all kinds of things happening as I play.

Now, I have about twenty per hand and can change the number of delays, change different parameters, the delays to the modulations and so forth. I developed the EIS over the time period that I was just talking about [1991].