All of my compositional interests, including the exploration of timbral edges, the building up of new soundworlds from pre-existent ones, and the invention of shapes and stories, start with a fundamental pleasure in sound. As I have become fascinated by the intertwining of electronic and acoustic, my sense of music has grown to include the rumble of machines in a working coal mine, the crunch of a potato chip, the blast of a shofar, the clink of a fork against a cup.

My interest in timbre led me to explore acoustic instruments and as well as computer-generated sound. At the University of Virginia, I established the Virginia Center for Computer Music, and have worked with MIDI systems, direct digital synthesis and the processing of natural-world sounds. My MIDI pieces have been programmed in HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language). In a piece such as Kairos, for flute and electronics, I used HMSL to change effects in real time. The flute's timbre is filtered through a changing environment; even the size of the hall appears to change. My work in direct digital synthesis and processing has been based on several languages: C-Sound, RT, Lisp, and Hack. The last was developed at VCCM by systems engineer Pete Yadlowsky, who also extended HMSL for use in the works mentioned above.