I was very excited about the potential of computers to work within such detailed parameters of sound, but I became intensely aware of what were, to me, serious limitations.  The quality of sound produced by computers was not nearly as interesting or rich as acoustic sound.  There was also a physical limitation—I had been diagnosed earlier that year with extreme environmental hypersensitivity, and I became intensely aware of the adverse effects of all electronics and computer technologies on my health due to this condition.  I adopted a physical, acoustic approach to music in which my understanding of the physics of sound created a continuum between sound and music. [1] I also worked with intuitive mathematical patterning.  This approach is based on a sense of perpetual motion or pulsation similar to, and influenced by, many of the tendencies in minimalist music, but the repeated pitch patterns change much more quickly and occur in more than one part simultaneously, creating several layers of counterpoint.  In 1990, when I began to focus on the rhythm and pulsation of the patterning, I began to perceive rhythms as energy systems.

While studying linguistics, I became intrigued by the underlying structural principles that were emerging from many diverse languages.  Language can be described as an arrangement of the stream of sensory experiences that result in a certain world order.  In the Hopi language, for example, there are no tenses for past, present or future—the division does not exist—and there is no formal distinction between the completion and incompletion of action.  This way of thinking resonates with many of the fundamental tenets of contemporary physics, such as the idea that the contrast between a particle and its field of vibration is more fundamental in the natural world than the contrasts of space and time or past, present and future—distinctions that our own language places on our understanding. [2]

Desiring to integrate principles of physics with acoustic sound sources, I discovered that the voice is the acoustic instrument with the greatest potential for timbral transformation.

In the rich and varied tradition of sacred chant, vocal music is structured as a stream of vowels and consonants.  This is also true of the ancient tradition of Bulgarian singing, which is based on the drone principle—words are sung on a single, repeated pitch with continuous changes in timbre created by the changing patterns of vowels.