I listen to a lot of music that teenagers are listening to because I'm around them.

I think the seed was planted when I was a teenager, and it took me until I got out of Juilliard. At Juilliard I was just learning to be a composer, but I was also learning how to manipulate computers.

I almost never these days sit down with a CD or my laptop and just listen to a piece with a score. I probably would do that while I'm exercising.

Works of art should be stimulating. They should wake people up rather than acting like a sedative.

I love silence. And one of the paradoxes about the way I live and also about my work is that definitely one of the reasons I went into music, and especially into composing is that I love setting up an environment where I can be by myself for long periods of time and have everything as quiet as possible, either to think about sound, or to think about ideas, or just to focus on things that are important to me.

I had grown up and gone to high school in New York, so I wanted to get out of the east coast.

One of my interests in music has always been what it means, why it affects us the way it does.