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

I noticed you could monitor the recording that you're making, but you could also monitor the playback head. There's a little distance between them and so you get an echo, right? If you change the amplitude of, say, the playback and play with that, you get different qualities and different sounds. So I was very interested in that phenomenon.

People's experiences are all different, and you don't know what the person experienced. They know, but you don't, so I think it's important to listen carefully to what a person has to say. And not to force them into any direction at all but simply to model what you've experienced, model it and also be what I call a Listening Presence. If you're really listening, then some of the barriers can dissolve or change.

I'm thinking of the audience as being ambient, meaning not sitting focused but being in the space and exploring it while listening to the players.

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.

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.

One day I decided I would like to put a record into my system. So I picked up a record that was lying on the table, and put it on. I didn't bother to look at what it was because I didn't care, and it turned out to be Madame Butterfly. So I processed the aria from Madame Butterfly in my system and I played with it.