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.

[Improvisation ] is been with me all my life. We all do it.

Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears

Before that, an 8-bit recording was pixelated; it was really bad. It didn't serve what I was doing, which was recording live sound and delaying it and feeding it back. This is essentially what the EIS system is: a bunch of delays.

The San Francisco Tape Music Centre was a kind of collective non-profit that my friends and I got started so that we could pool our equipment and make tape music.

It was around the end of the '60s, when I began to compose sonic meditations. Before that I was doing a lot of reflecting on myself, and listening to long tones.

In my Deep Listening class at RPI, I always do an hour of energy exercises to start with. Then we do a listening meditation after that, after the body has been loosened up and warmed up and is ready. We do the listening. After that, there's the journaling of the experience, which they do each time throughout the semester to the point that I have them write a final paper on what they've experienced.