Interactive Music Quotes

With Rock Band, you can play along to Black Sabbath or Nirvana and possibly find new ways of appreciating their artistry by being allowed to perform parallel to it. Rock Band puts you inside the guts of a song.

I saw this DJ playing music and saying things to the kids. They would answer him back, and I say, 'That's a great idea.'

Elemental Music is never just music. It's bound up with movement, dance and speech, and so it is a form of music in which one must participate, in which one is involved not as a listener bust as a co-performer.

'Wii Music' elevates the scope of music video games by moving beyond commentary on what music is - as 'Rock Band' and 'Guitar Hero' do - to suggesting what it could be. Yet I'm still left wondering: Couldn't it be more?

There are performances in which the people who have the best muscle skills and musical history may be on the stage, but it's not  -  like a Dead show is not like a usual sit-down performance; the audience does participate.

What Guitar Hero has done is to turn music inside out. Whereas the iPod made music very personal, very singular - you put your ear-buds in and you listen to it - Guitar Hero turned it around and made it very social. So it is fun to play. It's fun to play against people.

I love writing music for film and TV, but putting it into a video game is twice as fun because it needs to be repeatable and joyous.

The music has a better feeling when you're responding to what's going on. Music is like playing handball, playing catch with someone, not playing golf. Everywhere the ball bounces is where you respond to it.

The basic idea of a hyper instrument is where the technology is built right into the instrument so that the instrument knows how it's being played - literally what the expression is, what the meaning is, what the direction of the music is.

In 2008, I was more just thinking about using the touchscreen for writing the songs. From there I started thinking about how I visualised music.

The thing that's been most important to me is being interactive with people that are listening to my music.

Subway Symphony is a little idea I had to change the sound of the subway turnstiles into different pieces of music, depending on what station you're entering.

I think from age 13, 14, 15, I thought, yes, this rich studio produced music is the future, but it can't be the future to go run away into the recording studio. How can we take that kind of complexity and richness and make it possible for people to touch it and play it live. That's what hyperinstruments are.

I still think that I'm playing instruments, not just pushing buttons and there it goes. It's interactive and alive with the sound and the manipulation and it plays like instruments.

What makes games so exciting is that's a whole other- there's all sorts of other considerations on what music is supposed to achieve and what you're attempting to support, it's not uncommon to think of your music and to think of the way your orchestra plays for something like Jack and Daxter where you start with- you know because it has to change tempo and intensity as the action gets more intense.

There were a lot of things happen in the mid-'80's that all of a sudden made it possible to do a lot of very quick interactive music.

More and more as time has gone on, I realize that playing is really more about listening than it is about playing.