Two very early experiences got me thinking about music and sound. First was pianist/producer Herbie Hancock’s music video Rockit which fascinated me when I was four years old. I had never seen or heard scratching records, drum machine beats, or robotic dancing video feet and they were very exciting to me. Later that year, I got my first cassette tape recorder. The fisher-price toy came with a tape of a story told in sounds as well as words. For example, when the narrator talked about a fire, he crumpled cellophane, and when he spoke about wind, he blew on the microphone. After that, I began recording my own tapes of sounds, experimenting with how they can be put together to make something new.
In-between then and now, I have participated in a wide variety of musical traditions, philosophies, and instruments, combining my formal training with experimentation and research on my own. In middle school, I began learning about harmony and composition by borrowing the piano parts from the jazz band and wrote and arranged music for the band. In high school, I started exploring jazz, funk and improvisation with my band called the "Professors of Phunk." In my first years of college I discovered Indian classical music and transcribed ragas on trombone and studied tabla drums. Throughout college I continued to explore many different things in music as well as other arts and was always hungry to discover new ways to put things together.
At this point in my life, the thing that is exciting to me about performing arts is collaboration with other artists because I learn so much from the interaction. I am involved in a sign language for live composition called soundpainting where anyone who knows the signs can create a piece of music, theater, and/or dance by "speaking" to the performers as the piece unfolds. Another collaborative project I do is improvising on laptop computer with other musicians to create music that explores the crossover between sound and noise much like the tape recording stories of my youth.
