"So if this was ‘experimental music’, what was the experiment? Perhaps it was the continual re-asking of the question ‘what also could music be?’, the attempt to discover what makes us able to experience something as music. And from it, we concluded that music didn’t have to have rhythms, melodies, harmonies, structures, even notes, that it didn’t have to involve instruments, musicians and special venues. It was accepted that music was not something intrinsic to certain arrangements of things - to certain ways of organizing sounds - but was actually a process of apprehending that we, as listeners, could choose to conduct. It moves the site of music from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’. If there is a lasting message from experimental music, it’s this: music is something your mind does."

- Brian Eno, foreword to ‘Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond’ by Michael Nyman