My message is to forget about dichotomies. The Brain Opera is an opera, even if it does not tell a story in the usual way. It is a psychological journey with voices - so I do consider it an opera.

All the music we know that's popular is actually commonly shared music that takes things that are similar about all of us.

The English learned, in my view, how to use harmony much earlier than the French or the Italians, or the Germans.

I like the idea of imagining a sound and feeling a sound and then having it come out through your body, through an instrument. That's an important way to make music.

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.

I think that one of the things about music is it's supposed to be spontaneous, it's supposed to be real human beings bouncing off of each other whether its from the stage or to the audience, or jamming with friends.

The basic idea of a hyper instrument is where the technology is built right into the instrument so that the instrument knows how its being played - literally what the expression is, what the meaning is, what the direction of the music is.