In addition to mathematics and physics, who or what are some of your influences?
Philip Glass is a hugely influential figure in my life. It was through his music, and my uncle who was into Glass, that I learned about polyrhythms, which blew me away and occupied me as a kid. Another artist that is powerful in my mind is Sol LeWitt, with his adherence to process while creating art. Very conceptual, entirely rote work, his art comes from a series of instructions that are executed by people. But at the same time it's so moving and beautiful and profound; maybe in the same way as a NASA photograph, it gives you a sense of immensity behind the images. It's so computational; he was essentially writing software before there was software. And my work has a similar idea, but it's in a post-code world where now we have computers that can do these things eight million times per second, or at least that's what the crappy chips I use can do.
Alvin Lucier was similarly instructional or methodical, calling his work "sound experiment" rather than "music." Can you talk about the terms "experiment," "music" and "composition" as they may or may not relate to each other?
Great question. I actually like the term composition to describe my work. I think experimentation is about discovery and I don't think of myself as someone who discovers. My pieces are self-contained — basically frameworks for expression or composition. The first step to writing this album [1-Bit Symphony] was creating the software that would play back music that I'd write for it, setting up a structure within which I could compose. I don't think of that process as experimentation.
So you see your work as expressive and not a sterile scientific experiment. Right. I can relate to experiments and science, but the
