"New York Times" music critic Stephen Holden observed the wide range of Rose's improvisations, from late Romantic tonal solos to freeform explorations. Rose's 27 March 1986 performance at New York City's Experimental Intermedia Foundation featured Super 8 films that Rose shot in the Australian outback consisting of "rapid jump-cut editing and sped-up footage", which Holden described as "the most audacious music improvisations" and "the evening's most ambitious work." Writing about Rose's CD "Hyperstring" in "The Guardian", John L. Walters similarly observed how Rose's violin technique and technological experiments seem to escape any clear musical categories in "a violin-shaped world that is all his own, shot through with wild humour." "Jon Rose is the Thomas Edison of the vibrating string," wrote Ken Waxman in "Jazzword".