"I'd like to see people try to sample the sound less and try to sample the style a bit more. Some people see this sort of 'copying' as offensive... I'm inclined to think the opposite - all music is built on imitation and expansion."

"A song is not just a collection of melodic riffs, it is an emotional statement."

"Unfortunately Sting's jazz work isn't nearly as inventive as his rock songs."

"I'm starting to realize that touring really involves a lot of waiting around doing nothing."

"Stylistic evolution comes from listening to what other people have done and making a Darwinistic modification."

"I think we'll soon see a new breed of musicians who have both a modern chordal sense (jazz) and a high comfort level with synthesizers and new breeds of sounds (from the electronica/techno/dj scene)."

"One of the most common failings [when writing a drum track] is repetition. Nobody wants to hear that same stupid 16-line bass-snare pattern throughout the WHOLE song. Didn't your mother ever teach you that variety is the spice of life?"

"Sometimes if you polish too much, you rub off the shine."

"Father, dear father, come home with me now! The clock in the steeple strikes three; The house is so lonely, the hours are so long For poor weeping mother and me. Yes, we are alone, poor Benny is dead, And gone with the angels of light; And these were the very last words that he said, "I want to kiss Papa good night.""

"Every musician, I guess, wants to alter the world to his or her taste in some fashion... That's part of why I write music."

"I feel that music is the art which can best express the emotions which flow within us. It conveys something bigger than it is."

"There's a big difference between playing shows for fun, and playing shows because you're in desperate need of the money."

"I try to avoid categorizing music as much as I can, though. Everyone steals so much from everyone else these days, the lines between genres are very washed-out."

"It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born, And was always his treasure and pride; But it stopp'd short never to go again When the old man died."

"Music is nothing but ratios and harmonic math, anyways."

"Once you have a basic grasp of the theories underlying music, you can pretty much pick up any instrument you want."

"I've been fascinated with arcane chord progressions since I was young. The trick is to keep them interesting, while still in the realm of 'normality' (otherwise the listener has no context to appreciate the progressions in)."

"Silicon approaches certain fundamental limits; organic bliss is the soul catcher."

"Well anyone can make a 'weird' [chord] progression by randomly picking triads."

""Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the Jubilee! Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!" So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea, While we were marching through Georgia."

"I think as a musician you really have to have a wide variety of tastes, or else you will unconsciously get into a rut."

"Usually musicians have egos and personality quirks which makes it difficult to form collaborative efforts (for long periods of time, anyways)."

"A lot of [my] songs have various strange oddities in them - usually this is the result of late-night dementia."

"A lot of my tracked music was written when I was very young, relatively speaking. I was very optimistic, I had finally discovered some sort of public musical outlet, it was generally a very happy time. So, the music of that time sort of reflects that, I think? By the time I started the Alpha Conspiracy project, I was older, a bit more sophisticated (and, well, cynical), and so the music got more complex."

"As with any collaboration, you have to find someone that's in your 'mode' of making music."

"If anything I probably gravitate to things with great melodies/harmonies, and interesting/syncopated beats."

"Well, when music "moves" someone, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a positive direction. Some people certainly get moved by darker music, and there are all sorts of emotions which music can create that are interesting -- aggression, foreboding, anger, fear. Not everyone wants to feel happy all the time :)"

"I think there are some objective [musical] qualities... how complex something is, how melodic, how diverse the tonality is, et cetera. But I could also make a piece of music that contains all of those and yet isn't "good" from a subjective viewpoint. For example, take Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", Beatles "Yesterday", and Underworld's "Born Slippy", and play them all on top of each other at the same time. Great music in their own right, but terrible sounding together."

"If someone only ever listens to, say, Nickelback, their opinion [about music taste] is valid but largely meaningless since they don't bring any depth to the discussion :)"

"Some people are like "Oh, I hate guitars." How can you hate a guitar? It makes no sense. It's just an instrument."

"I find a lot of club music extremely boring."

"So, if you played a C major chord to pretty much any person on the planet, they'd say that it sounds "harmonious" (or pleasing, or happy, etc, etc). But now when you want to put chords and melodies in an ordering and make a larger piece called a "song", then that is a much more difficult process, and gets very subjective. At that point, it's not just the chords, it's the lyrics, rhythms, instrumentation, tempo, intensity, any number of other things that goes into a song... so many variables that it's almost impossible to predict how a song will affect a given person."

"Certainly there are songs out there that are massively popular, and you can use some reverse analysis to see how they're put together, but it's difficult to reliably engineer a "hit". Add to this the constantly swirling winds of cultural taste, and you can see that the music industry is more akin to playing the lottery than anything else. Having some talent or taste can give you a bit of an edge, but it's still a huge roulette wheel.."

"I'm much more into 'electronica' (yeah, I know it's cliche these days)."

"We started out in the middle ages creating music which had certain desirable physical properties (for example, a major chord sounds "nice" because the frequencies are in integer ratios to each other). And then as society evolved, we created these emotional contexts for certain instruments and progressions. Major-chord arpeggios sound "happy", minor chords sound "sad", chromatic scales can sound "scary", et cetera. In the 20th century, film soundtracks reinforced this point as people associated certain kinds of music with certain visual and emotional experiences. It's a giant feedback loop, really; once you grow up in a given culture, it leaves this musical fingerprint on you which colors your experiences."

"If I was obsessed with making money off of my music, I wouldn't have released it for free on the internet for the last 5 years."

"To impact someone emotionally, [a musical piece] has to contain "interesting" melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic content, and what defines "interesting" is up to the listener."

"Imagine presenting a Nirvana or BT track to someone from the 1850's, they would probably see it as noise and not much else. Society as a whole has a much more nuanced and wide view of what music can be now. It still usually contains various rhythmic, melodic, and vocal components, but they can be combined in so many interesting ways now."

"It's hard to quantify a 'top ten' list of songs for many reasons. I like many styles of music, and it's difficult to compare radically divergent types of music with each other."

"One of the issues these days is the sheer amount of music out there to be listened to. There are more bands than one could ever hope to explore."

"You could argue that there's maybe some mathematical interest in a Bach fugue, say, but the only thing that music does really well is "move" people -- make them feel something."

"Ideally, a song should contain both elements of high melodic tension, and low melodic tension. No listener wants to sit through a totally high-energy 180 BPM non-stop 6-minute ride through synth mania unless they are already busy grooving madly on some dance floor in a smoky club somewhere. Also, unless your listener is on heavy sedation, he or she will not enjoy your sparse 18-minute ambient tune which consists of the same languid piano riff repeated over and over again."

"I'm not a big fan of asynchronicity just for its own sake - a lot of people push rhythmic variation so far that the basic pulse of the music gets lost (and the listener is confused)."

"Unfortunately, as technology has improved, that which was 'underground' now heads towards obsolescence."