[My interest in music] is from my mother and my grandmother, who were pianists, and they taught.

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 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 am also interested in music expanding consciousness. By expanding consciousness, I mean that old patterns can be replaced with new ones.

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.

I'm very interested in vertical space.I want the players to listen to their sound in such a way that they hear the complete sound they make before they make another one. So that means that they hear the tail of the sound. Because of the reverberation, there's always more to the sound than just the sound.

When I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.