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.

Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.

Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears

I thought that it would be interesting to have a mirror and grab a light and shine it around in different ways. It's an analog to the acoustic reflections that we're going to be trying to activate as well.

I didn't have any sophisticated equipment at all. The equipment we had in the studio at the time was not intended to make music; it was for testing purposes. So we had to repurpose all the equipment to make music. That made me try a lot of different things.

I'll just say that I made my own explorations of tone by listening to a tone for a long time until I began to understand what my sensations were, what my mind was doing with tone.

I try to influence this improvisation in two ways. One is by centering on reflections, in both senses of the word: acoustic reflections as well as visual reflections from a mirror or surface, and then reflecting on the material in a contemplative way. The other influence is listening to the tails of the sounds that you make.