Like most music students, my background was in classical music. Before coming to CalArts I thought I wanted to do studio recordings, DJ-ing and scratching with vinyl records. But when I got here, I realized that the art world is much larger than I had imagined. In my second year I attended the Bijou Film Festival on campus, and I just fell in love with film. Even though I didn’t have a compositional background, I wanted to create and collaborate with filmmakers. It wasn’t as much about music as it was about sound.

The Music Tech Program at CalArts is relatively new. It’s a completely wild world that includes everything from studio recording and producing, to building interactive robots that play music with a band—any and all projects in which music and technology meet. The faculty is wonderfully accepting—they are all artists themselves. My mentor completely understood where I was coming from and where I wanted to go. Though I’ve worked on many conventional projects, most of my sound designs, especially the experimental pieces, are very different from what you’d hear in Hollywood movies. They’re auditory experiences—which is what I think music is.