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.

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.

There's just an incredibly rich and interesting relationship between our listening to music and the way our minds engage.

When I was done with high school, I knew that music was really important to me and I knew I didn't want to be a cellist, but I wasn't really sure if I wanted to be a composer, or think about - I was just interested in the ideas behind music, I was interested in mathematics.

I started realizing that one of the great things about opera is that if you make the right kind of story, you can still have this kind of abstract subliminal quality to take you on a journey, but you can root it just enough in a particular situation, a particular kind of real situation that a person might have, or a particular context in the real world.

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

You have to train your mind and your ears, but they're more like athletic skills. So, part of music you just have to learn those things or you can't practice the art.