Ambient Music is music in which time is suspended, that is, it has no clear sense of tempo. This music evolves slowly and invites contemplative thought on the part of the listener.

MRI is based on a piece of multimedia art by Ryan DaWalt called MRI: Atomic Weights. The artwork was created with a magnetic process, similar to the mechanism by which Magnetic Resonance Imaging works. This piece plays upon the acronym, MRI, by representing its letters as the atomic elements Meitnerium (Mt), Radium (Ra) and Iodine (I), and their atomic numbers, which are 109, 88 and 53 respectively.

In composing music to accompany the piece, I used these numbers to provide both macro- and micro-structural elements. The piece begins with a single note, followed by a long rest, then by a nine-note melody, thus representing the number 109. This pattern is repeated for 109 measures. The tempo is 109 beats per minute. Representing "88," a bassline is added that is comprised of two eight-note figures. This pattern is repeated for 88 bars. Next we hear a set of five, five-note chords, followed by three three-note chords. This pattern is played for 53 bars. In addition, during the middle section the chords are dropped by a musical third and a musical fifth, before returning to the original key.

The frame of DaWalt's piece is modelled after a subway train window. Several elements of the music are brought in to create the effect of travelling by train. Extensive use of reverberation respresents the ambience of the subway tunnel. A cymbal swell represents a subway train racing by the opposite direction. A filtered pulse depicts the hypnotic rhythm of steel wheels clacking over the railroad tie joints. Later in the piece, you can hear the cars coupling and uncoupling.

Muh-He-Kun-Ne-Tuck imagines the point of first contact between European and Native peoples on the Hudson River. This piece, whose name means "Water that flows both ways," was part of a suite of compositions—each written about a different railroad station along the Metro-North Hudson River Line—that a class and I created. In writing about Poughkeepsie, the closest stop on the Hudson Line to the river's source, I have tried to capture the glistening water in its primordial state.

Vistas is a video that features and ambient music composition accompanied by images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telecope. The images show some of the beautiful things one can see from space, and takes you on a journey to the most beautiful space object of all.

The music of Vistas was built around a  synthesizer patch that seems tangibly pregnant with life. Throughout the piece, its timbre explores the boundary between clean, and distorted textures, while remaining warm and human throughout. This piece was not performed on a keyboard, but by playing the pads on an Akai drum controller. Using this technology forced me to approach the composition differently, relying on slowly moving textural changes, rather than melodic movement. The other element, a spacey synthetic glockenspiel, represents the fragility of the human experience against the vastness of space.