Resonance is a physical process through which similarities are highlighted.

I teach a graduate seminar called "Theorizing Improvisation" that is pretty interdisciplinary, but really makes students deal with black studies seriously. A lot of authors of color, a lot of women of color - those become central to the intellectual trajectory. It considers music, but it also considers areas of thought that might seem unrelated to music. That's partly because we're expanding the notion of what music is beyond objects, beyond scores, beyond things.

The sense of having to be the best at everything gets in the way of anybody doing anything. I put all that aside; it's not worth thinking about when I'm there. My agenda as an artist doesn't go away when I teach. It actually gets intensified.

Music making features real-time creation, real-time decisions and actions. It's basically improvisation, which is the stuff of everyday life. In the realm of discourse about music, improvisation is marginal, but in the realm of doing it, it's omnipresent. Strange distinction here: we're improvising all the time, but when we tend to talk about music, we tend to talk about objects that are fixed, like recordings, scores, pieces.

It is one thing to be a virtuoso, but a different thing to play with compassion.

I'm what they call a 'non-black person of color': NBPOC. It's easy and seductive and common to mobilize around these identity issues, but often that's done at the expense of considering structural anti-blackness. That puts everything in a slightly different light for me, especially because of where I am and why - where I am in the world of the arts, where I live, in Harlem - and the music that I've been able to make, whom I've been able to make it with, who has nurtured me. It's not just about solidarity. It's actually about debt.

What I find the challenge is with working with, say, digital machines - performing electronic music - is that when we play instruments there's a physical act that results in a physical vibration. There's a mapping between our exertions and resultant vibrations, or resonance.