I did take composition lessons when I was in high school, so I wrote piano pieces. I wrote some chamber music. I don't think any of that was particularly interesting.

One of the big mysteries of music is, if you take music without words, it means something to us because we know it's about something. It's about something important humanly, but since there are no words, nobody knows what it's about.

I think a double bass for me would be too much effort. But the cello, you're really engaged and the sound is kind of right here. So, it feels like being merged, married to an instrument.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.

I listen to new music by composers who are interesting to me. I listen to some; I don't know if I want to call it pop, but it's some interesting artist that gets my attention, I listen to in the mornings.

I think it's maybe because Sergeant Pepper's came out when I was about 13 or 14 and that was a pretty impressionable age, and it was such a kind of radical period. But that period of the Beatles really had a big influence on me and I think are directly related to hyperinstruments.

The one obvious thing is that the devices are so good now that you can also see their limitations extremely well.