In your kind of training as a musician,
where did you reach the point where you realized,
wait a second I have to go there.
And then, how did you continue that?
That's a good question because my training was
very traditional and it didn't give a hint.
If you to look at it on paper it didn't give a hint that I would
be doing the kind of work I'm doing today.
My first teacher, probably
my most important early influence was a student of Nadia Bouygues in Paris in the 60s.
And another teacher was a student of Bouygues.
So, my training was very traditional.
I wrote [inaudible] and sonatas and all sorts of things on paper from the age of 10.
And at a certain point,
I started getting interested in electronic music.
I wasn't sure I could articulate at that point why I was moving away from paper.
But I was doing things like going around the campus of Indiana University,
Bloomington with little mini disc recorder at that time.
It would have been about the late 1990s early 2000s.
And recording people in the gym,
playing basketball or tennis or that sort of
thing or even taking a ball and kicking it around the back.
The Musical Arts Center and in the reverberant hallways.
And being interested in using sound like photographs,
And I got interested in Musique concrète,
the French early electronic music tradition.
And then, when I went to grad school,
I started to notice that-.
I stopped writing electronic music for a while.
And then I went back to writing on paper.
And I found that,
that experience of writing
electronic music led me to be less satisfied with music on paper.
In other words, a piece of music that would be written
from left to right and perform the same way,
by the same instruments,
in the same order of notes rhythms et cetera,
every time it's performed.
I became less satisfied by that proposition.
So, I started looking to ways of messing with that model.
And one of the earliest things I did in grad school was start
introducing text as an instrumental voice,
as a musical element,
in a texture that included instruments and other sounds.
Because I thought listening to text would change the experience of
listening to a piece of music that there
was maybe a cinematic element that was created by using text.
And then I thought, well,
is there a way to take these various elements and start making
pieces that were not always performed in the same way.
And like Bill, early on,
my first experiments in this direction were quite low tech.
I wrote a piece called, Without Stopping,
that had various tracks on a CD Discman.
And the Discman would be on shuffle function that
would create the sort of oceanic waves of sound,
which I thought was really interesting, although the limited.
Because it only did exactly what was on the CD.
So then later on, I got interested in Maxim SPV,
a Visual programming language,
where I could do
more sophisticated manipulations of sounds that have a computer start to make
choices to approach a kind of intelligence,
an intelligent way of making choices about music that I could program in such a way
that results tended towards things that I would find interesting
that I would like or feel like they represented my aesthetic ideas.