Composer Nico Mulhy: "I’m positive I understand how augmented chords change an emotional texture because of Nintendo music."

The fine folks at Snarkmarket pointed to this excerpt from an NPR interview with classical composer Nico Mulhy on the connections between a Nintendo childhood and composition:

For me, living in the country, playing a video game  was sort of like  music minus one: The actions of my hands informed, in a strange  way,  the things I heard. Collect a coin, and a delighted glockenspiel sounds.  Move from navigating a level above ground to one below ground, and the  eager French chromaticism of the  score changes to a spare, beat-driven  minimal texture. Hit a star, and suddenly  the score does a metric  modulation. All of these things come to bear in a later  musical  education; I’m positive I understand how augmented chords change an   emotional texture because of Nintendo music.