My mother brought accordion home. She was going to learn to play it so she could teach it and increase her income. And I got fascinated with it, so s….

Maybe I'll start from the initial idea, what motivated me to do that. In 1953, I had access to a tape recorder. Tape recorders were not widely availa….

Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening..

I heard a lot of different kinds of music. I heard country music, I heard jazz, I heard symphonic music, opera, everything you can think of except ve….

I didn't have any sophisticated equipment at all. The equipment we had in the studio at the time was not intended to make music; it was for testing p….

Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music..

There are these sounds that come from outside that work really well if you're listening. If you're not listening, if you're blocking them out, then y….

I noticed you could monitor the recording that you're making, but you could also monitor the playback head. There's a little distance between them an….

We think about sitting in a space and hearing some music by having our ears pointed forward towards the musicians sitting opposite us. I'm really not….

When we had the San Francisco Tape Music Center, we had a couple of Ampex tape machines there, and I could string tape from one machine, past the hea….

I used to go into the studio around midnight and stay all night..

The sound that I play is delayed, it's modified, and it's modulated. It's an intelligent system; it's happening now..

Those people who don't have any voluntary control, or hands, can work with the physical movement that they can do - whatever voluntary movement they ….

It takes time because the habitual response to that is very deep. It goes back to our earliest responses as babies. You have to feel safe, and if a s….

I try to influence this improvisation in two ways. One is by centering on reflections, in both senses of the word: acoustic reflections as well as vi….

We have a very large constituency in the world from all of the years that we've done workshops, retreats, and talks. I would say there a few thousand….

I had to cope with attitudes that were not supportive all along. I mean, you still have that..

I have a commission to do a piece in a place in California, Oliver Ranch, which has an eight-storey structure called The Tower designed by the visual….

When I composed the first sonic meditation, I realized that I was composing the direction of attention..

[Improvisation ] is been with me all my life. We all do it..

I try to schedule the Intensives wherever I go..