I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they're happy if they do get it.

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

I believe in singing.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.

People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.

Most game music is based on loops effectively.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.

I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.