Once you're born, the windows to these other senses – sight, taste, touch – suddenly turn on and sound seems to take a back seat to this. We are primarily visual creatures. That has to do with our evolutionary past. I think something like a third of the brain is in some form dedicated to processing visual information and a much, much, much smaller part of the brain is dedicated to processing sound. It's still significant but nothing in comparison. However, the fascinating thing is that our consciousness is developing against a background of sound. So we become conscious in the womb, in some way and we become conscious in the presence of sound so that our consciousness is... at the moment of birth, there is something already there that has been analysing the world and reacting to it in some preformed way and it’s that intelligence, that consciousness, however primitive it is by our later evolution that then analyses the world.

So that... I think this goes some way to explaining for me why sound plays the emotional role that it does, because when it touches us – and music is the best example of this – it touches us in a place that is very hard to articulate in terms of words. We can talk a lot about visual things. We can analyse them visually, but it's very hard for human beings to talk about sound with words. I think because the sound and our basic consciousness are inexplicably, inextricably tied up together. This happens to all of us and not all of us become musicians or, in my case, somebody who works creatively in sound. So it's not a determining factor. My mother did sing to me in the womb, she told me and I remember that song. That song that she sang, which was My Darling Clementine, has a peculiar quality to me when I hear it because I heard it before I knew who I was or that there was anything other than me and that my mother existed. It was just something in the environment. So this is my own base-ground and I think about things in that way but as I said, this is something that is common to all humanity. We all emerge into consciousness in this way.