Opening ears

This article will attempt to describe how and why a drawing method became central to my compositional process; why I use just-intonation-based ratios; how I incorporate ratios into my work in relation to the drawings; and how the consequences of working with musical material in the way I do affects the listening experience. I will provide some background information (the origins of some aspects of my approach), and will explain why I, as a young composer at the end of the 20th century, was drawn to this method; to metre-less material; to the rejection of manuscript paper; to acoustical phenomena; and to a microtonality stemming from the just-intonation ratio system (and I will pose some philosophical questions along the way).