I think a double bass for me would be too much effort. But the cello, you're really engaged and the sound is kind of right here. So, it feels like being merged, married to an instrument.

Strangely, the thing I listen to 75% of the time, when I'm exercising with my headphones on is English Tudor/Elizabethan music, so music from about 1450 to the early 1600's.

I like the idea of imagining a sound and feeling a sound and then having it come out through your body, through an instrument. That's an important way to make music.

My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.

The one obvious thing is that the devices are so good now that you can also see their limitations extremely well.

My message is to forget about dichotomies. The Brain Opera is an opera, even if it does not tell a story in the usual way. It is a psychological journey with voices - so I do consider it an opera.

Why does every society seem to want to make music when it often seems like kind of a frill.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.

Works of art should be stimulating. They should wake people up rather than acting like a sedative.

There's many reason music exists and we are beginning to no only understand that, but measure that.

There's just an incredibly rich and interesting relationship between our listening to music and the way our minds engage.

Any idiot can put up a website.

I always gravitate towards things that are not beautiful, but broken and weird and fascinating

Humility adds lessons to our pain and suffering, turning the seemingly senseless into meaning.

One of the greatest tragedies of life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts.

In the long term, to defeat this ideology [terrorism] - and they [terrorists] are bound by an ideology - you defeat it with a more hopeful ideology called freedom.

Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason for or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one.

When a man loves a woman, he'll spend his very last dime tryin' to hold on to what he needs.

Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.

I don't know what's tighter, our jeans or our friendship.

It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.