To interact means being among others, and taking others into account in a way, to act.

With electronic music it's often a little more hidden - the relationship between gesture and sound - which makes it confounding for audiences. But the ingredients of electronic music are the same ingredients of nonelectronic music.

My concern with this approach is that music becomes a substance devoid of people. It's a consumer model of what music is: subjects listening to objects. For me, music is subjects listening to subjects. It's about intersubjectivity.

In the 1990s I got to play in a group that played in prisons in California. We would play in maximum security wards. It was infuriating. Those kinds of situations stick with me. We got to come in and play music for them because that's a way of caring, just offering something, a gift, basically. They're basically the most grateful audiences I've ever experienced, because nobody's giving them anything.

What we call music is what reminds us of ourselves. And sometimes electronic music helps lead the imagination to a space that seems outside of ourselves. But it never really is.

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.

If we reject the word, or any word that labels music, what's left? That's the question we should all ask ourselves. Ben Ratliff asked it, and he came up with aesthetic categories. That's not what I would say. What's left are communities who make music together, or among whom music circulates. That's it.