However much you shift your own wavepattern over the frequency spectrum, will you ever actually see the object, with which your own wavepattern is intermodulating? Is this an analogy of life? Do we ever perceive reality? Is reality always disguised- always an indecipherable intermodulation between ourselves and 'what lies beyond'? Is this what St Paul was referring to when he said: 'The world was created by the word of God so that what is seen is made out of things that do not appear'?

In our arts I think we should reflect and examine the social organisations of today and of the future. The arts should act as an analogy of the possible social and technological systems, so that we can preview and criticise these systems without needing to use the human race as guinea pigs to try them out. Let me give you an example of how I think it works. Total serialisation in music seems to me to be a ‘try-out’ of a type of computerisation. In writing his totally serialised music Pierre Boulez, whether intentionally or not, seems to have given us a glimpse of a world where freehand, empirical, human control is withdrawn and everyone (and everything) is submitted to total permutated 'logical’ control by computers. It appears an arid, cold, inhuman world to me and not what I would choose; but others may prefer it and certainly in the 1950s It looked as if the world was heading in that direction.

But could we, perhaps, here just attempt an analogy? For it is as if the human being has thousands upon thousands of energy stores, each tuned for a purpose, each charged with a potential which allows it to sound forth. It is as if each human being is an instrument of concord and discord, consisting of thousands upon thousands of finely tuned circuits; each circuit with its own control of pitch and loudness, able to adjust its voice, in harmony or dissonance, in balance and accord, so that it becomes part of the great pattern which makes an individual.

And on a more metaphoric level, what most interests or excites you about working with time in music, and within the realm of software?

In our arts I think we should reflect and examine the social organisations of today and of the future. The arts should act as an analogy of the possible social and technological systems, so that we can preview and criticise these systems without needing to use the human race as guinea pigs to try them out.

Do you think it is the role of music always to reflect the life of the day? Personally I think it is much more than that- we have already mentioned its role of inducing resonance, its greatest role to my mind-but, as well as that, I think it should not only reflect the life of the day but show the possibilities for the future. It should show all the possibilities ... the grim ones as well as the pleasant. We should not ask it to wear pink spectacles.

However, in my experience, interesting musical sounds are far more complicated than this. In my work I am not concerned with synthesizing orchestral sounds-we have excellent orchestras for making those sounds: my interest is in making new sounds which are musical. But I find that the adding of sine waves together in these 'classical recipes' gives a very 'electronic', inhuman sound with a clinical quality, lacking the possibility of subtlety and nuance. To be human is to have great ranges of expression, to have such infinite range that one moment there can be warmth and the next moment coldness. But what a dreadfully inadequate description that is . . . it needs a poet to give even a hint of the richness of being human. What words can hope to describe it? But could we, perhaps, here just attempt an analogy? For it is as if the human being has thousands upon thousands of energy stores, each tuned for a purpose, each charged with a potential which allows it to sound forth. It is as if each human being is an instrument of concord and discord, consisting of thousands upon thousands of finely tuned circuits ; each circuit with its own control of pitch and loudness, able to adjust its voice, in harmony or dissonance, in balance and accord, so that it becomes part of the great pattern which makes the individual. To visualise a human being in this way we would need a most wonderful mixture of fundamentals, harmonics and overtones, all subtly changing from moment to moment . .. a whole spectrum of resonate frequencies which are never at rest, never in a steady state, but are vibrant with pulsating tension. Like the intricate groove of a gramophone record the resulting 'sound track' would be extremely difficult to analyse in all its aspects, for there would be so many components in a state of flux. Yet it would exist as an entity, as a resultant whole, as a vast tangible river of flowing tensions. Is this picture really so fanciful after all? Could it be that within our material, chemical, make up we have an electrical existence which consists in reality of actual tuned circuits? Is each cell in our bodies itself a tuned circuit (or part of a tuned circuit)?

In my work I am not concerned with synthesizing orchestral sounds-we have excellent orchestras for making those sounds: my interest is in making new sounds which are musical.

A sine wave seems an 'about-turn' point ... you cannot reduce it further in its tonal existence, for it becomes more. ... Could this strange behaviour of the sine wave have a metaphysical counterpart in life? Might we find that if we whittled down our vastly complex and hurly-burly lives, until we had focused upon just the essential fundamentals, we would then perceive a different richness presenting itself- a richness governed by natural symmetry and elegance? Not too much of it, mind you, for too much 'fearful symmetry' soon palls- we need a mixture of both worlds, symmetrical and asymmetrical, so that we can jump from aspect to aspect and compare results. We need a certain amount of unforeseen impediment and, later on, we might muse upon the thought of how much aleatoricism (chance happening) is beneficial in filling out the symmetry.

The sine wave is a fascinating phenomenon. The strange fact is that if you take the graph of one, and cut off part of it, you don't reduce it, you add more sine waves to it!

What of the future? What is the next step? Will the composer disappear altogether? Or will the pendulum, perhaps, swing the other way, making the composer all important...and so the performer will disappear? Maybe the performer will take over more and more responsibility on the concert platform, while the composer turns his attention to composing with machines music that need no performer.

Beware of those busybodies who go around telling you what you should feel, and when you still don't feel it they tell you why you should feel it, and how you should feel it; they write long programme notes and newspaper articles about this work and that performer. If we read all this unnecessary verbiage we find ourselves so preconditioned that we cannot go to meet the music with our own vibrant wavepattern intact; for we are warped and stilted, or else artificially expectant, and, being not true to ourselves, we cannot expect to gain a true impression from the music. So if I do give any advice, it would be to meet the music without any preconceived ideas. Remember that the signal reaching your consciousness is as much you as it is the music-it is the sum and difference of you and the music. If you can clarify your own wavepattern and clear it of all irrelevances, before you modulate the music with it, then you have more chance of finding the experience rewarding. If you can become so sensitive to the music, so related to it, that it lifts you to a different region of resonance, then that achievement is almost as much to your credit as it is to the composer.