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

After a year, I thought gee I don't really need college anymore, which wasn't correct, but that's what I thought.

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

I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz for a year, which turned out to be a really vibrant, very intensive intellectual atmosphere where you could do a lot of aspect of music without it being a conservatory. And that's why I went there.

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 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.

My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.