56 Quotes by Tod Machover

The way I listen to music goes in waves depending on a lot of things. How busy I am, if I'm in between composition projects, if I'm starting a new project. So, the only time I listen to the radio for music is with my daughter's when I'm driving them to school, or driving them somewhere.

When I was done with high school, I knew that music was really important to me and I knew I didn't want to be a cellist, but I wasn't really sure if I wanted to be a composer, or think about - I was just interested in the ideas behind music, I was interested in mathematics.

I had grown up and gone to high school in New York, so I wanted to get out of the east coast.

I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz for a year, which turned out to be a really vibrant, very intensive intellectual atmosphere where you could do a lot of aspect of music without it being a conservatory. And that's why I went there.

After a year, I thought gee I don't really need college anymore, which wasn't correct, but that's what I thought.

You have to train your mind and your ears, but they're more like athletic skills. So, part of music you just have to learn those things or you can't practice the art.

One of my interests in music has always been what it means, why it affects us the way it does.

One of the big mysteries of music is, if you take music without words, it means something to us because we know it's about something. It's about something important humanly, but since there are no words, nobody knows what it's about.

There's just an incredibly rich and interesting relationship between our listening to music and the way our minds engage.