There are these sounds that come from outside that work really well if you're listening. If you're not listening, if you're blocking them out, then you don't get it. You don't get the merger of what the players are doing with everything, listening to everything.

Something that I did, and I developed out of that sonic meditations, which were pieces that I composed in the '70s that now are very well-known and used in many classrooms all over the world, but at the time were outrageous.

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].

I heard a lot of different kinds of music. I heard country music, I heard jazz, I heard symphonic music, opera, everything you can think of except very modern music.

I had to cope with attitudes that were not supportive all along. I mean, you still have that.

Maybe I'll start from the initial idea, what motivated me to do that. In 1953, I had access to a tape recorder. Tape recorders were not widely available. There was no cassette tape back then. It was a Sears Roebuck tape machine. I put a microphone in the window and recorded the ambience.

I wrote my sonic meditations and started using them with students. I took a bunch of UCSD students out to Joshua Tree and we did the sonic meditations on the boulders.