If you do not have a good quality satellite sound system connected to the audio output of your computer, as the composer I would prefer that you NOT download the sound samples. My pieces are like my spirit children and I don't want them to be treated badly by inadequate transducers. It's already bad enough that the sound samples are compressed versions (a current internet requirement) of what you would hear from the CDs which are in themselves digitized (distorted) versions of the analog sounds as I heard them originally. To navigate those shoals I test and adjust all my sound samples on 7 different audio systems and 3 different computers in my personal studios and scores of audio and computer systems out in the field. In a nutshell, what I've found is that all built-in computer sound systems STINK and should never be used for music. If you are more than half-serious about music, connect at least a good audio system to your computer. The better the audio system, the richer and deeper your musical experience, and the closer to hearing the music as the composer did.

Furthermore, please remember that the sound samples are just samples--not highlights, not the pieces, just out of context highly compressed excerpts that hang together in ways that give a sense of what one might expect to hear from various tracks. It's important to get beyond confusing the samples for the pieces. If you are at all interested in the quality of music, listening to a CD via a good audio system gets your ears reasonably close to the original music. In any case, avoid settling for dumbed down audio. The difference between even a decent satellite audio system hanging on the end of a computer and what you would hear from a good standalone audio system is like the difference between night and day. Often I hear from young people who've grown up with buds in the ears that they doubt they could hear the difference between mediocre and good audio. My response to them is that now is a good time to educate your ear so you can have a lifelong deeper appreciation of the power and beauty of sound to affect your soul. Much is lost when music is considered no more than a commodity to be squeezed into smaller and smaller storage spaces. Go for the systems that can handle bigger files; they tell better stories.

CD 1 - Audience Favorites

Excerpt from associated essay, Personal Studies

"CD 1 - Audience Favorites is composed of a never-before-now-published collection of 12 pieces that have been field tested in hundreds of concerts and radio and television broadcasts in North America, South America and Europe. Of the numerous pieces showcased in those events, this collection emerges as audience favorites. That anyone actually likes my music is always a pleasant surprise; that’s because my compositions tend to be a bit on the esoteric side, mainly personal studies that take the forms of answers to questions I pose to myself about instruments, mechanical or organic systems, feelings of the moment, dream states, or future projections.

I never compose pieces for the approval of audiences but I always expect to test them on audiences, to test whether my answers to my questions have forms that communicate beyond my own circumscribed world. Of course I’m pleased when they do communicate, but I’m just as pleased when they don’t, because that always stimulates a search for answers to questions about the nature of musical communication. Why was I moved and they weren’t? Will more of them eventually be moved? What was I thinking musically that they couldn’t follow? Does it make any difference? Should I make adjustments? And if so, what sorts of adjustments? Why are some people always irritated by challenges of any kind, particularly in the arts? And so on with the questions. It’s just one more form of mental gymnastics.

Unlike most composers, until the past few years, I never felt compelled to publish my work in any of the traditional recorded forms—scores, vinyl, tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc. There were a number of reasons for my position. One was that I was making a living doing live performances and I wanted to present only my latest work without feeling pressured to include pieces people knew from recordings. Another was connected with the physical, almost mystical notion of experiencing sound, once excited, being free to move in a variety of ways—to bounce off some obstacles in directions determined by the angle of incidence, to induce some obstacles to resonate and to produce their own sounds thus adding their signature to the mix, to curve around some obstacles, to be absorbed more or less by other obstacles, to fall on the ears of fellow performers to influence what music might come out of them, and to be there in person to sense the music of my fellows as well as the feedback from the audience. Plus I am as intrigued with and excited about performance spaces as I am the art processes and people who fill those spaces. So, for the most part, beginning in the late 1960s I chose as a composer to continue my history as a performer and to integrate that history with all that I discover about composition in a lifetime of studying all facets of music and closely allied fields in the dynamic arts, science, and affordable emerging technology…"