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.

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.

I think that this performance with the Thingamajigs is going to be an exploration of the acoustic space and particularly the vertical space, which we don't think about so much.

I would play a long tone on my accordion, or I'd sing one, and I would note how it felt - what it did with my mental space. These were meditations that I did.

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.

We have a very large constituency in the world from all of the years that we've done workshops, retreats, and talks. I would say there a few thousand people out there that have some relationship to what we do.

It's going to take about a year or two for the transfer to be completed. We have a certification program so professionals can teach deep listening.