original proposal: 1. what was you most significant intellectual experience at princeton?

It's of course hard to isolate a single most significant intellectual experience at Princeton, but one would undoubtedly be my exposure to the music of Paul Lansky. He was an early pioneer in computer music, but while other composers were interested in what new sounds computers could make, Paul was invested in what they could do with old ones. He took everyday noises – passing cars in “Night Traffic,” clattering dishes in “Tables Clear,” or spoken syllables in “Idle Chatter” – and organized them into elaborate pieces of music.

I first encountered Paul as a student in his composition workshop. I was immediately captivated by his music, but lacked the technical skills to pursue his method. Instead, I followed his advice and continued to explore the acoustic material that was more familiar to me, resolving to let the music of noises wait until I could focus on it in my independent work. But Paul's ideas involve a different way of experiencing sound, and simply thinking about writing noise as music completely revolutionized my auditory universe. I began to hear everything as a musical instrument: the staccato scribbling of pencils, the reverberant thud of steps in a stairwell, the way in which the steady rustle of leaves pans from left to right with a gust of wind. I remember spending an afternoon devoted to discerning the different sounds made by throwing berries into Carnegie Lake.

While Paul tends to value sound extracted from its setting–scoring the noise of kitchen utensils so they sound like a symphony orchestra – I became more invested in the ways in which sound illuminates its native environment. Pursuing African studies, I became increasingly disillusioned with conventional methods of international development, and I began to speculate on how sounds could become agents of empowerment for their places of origin. Although Africa was widely discussed in the West, its own voices were largely unheard, and so the continent could be characterized in terms that did not reflect it. Bringing its distinctive soundscape directly into my own music seemed like a way of both celebrating it and letting it speak for itself.

I'm still learning how to write this music, and I'm still thinking hard about its applications, but discovering its possibility radically changed my experience at Princeton, the direction in which I see myself moving as a musician and a composer, and the way in which I interact with and conceive of the world around me.