Andy Schmeder was born on November 26 1978 at home in Point Richmond, California. He grew up in Santa Rosa, CA and graduated from Piner High School / C-TEC, 1997. He received a BA in Mathematics from UC Berkeley, 2002. He has since worked as a consultant on a variety of projects including graphics and multimedia production, internet application development and scientific research. Recently he has worked for the Auditory Perception Lab, Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley and currently is employed as Research Programmer at the Center for New Music & Audio Technologies, Department of Music, UC Berkeley.

His musical life began at age eight with training in the Suzuki method for piano. His talent for computer technologies also began at a young age--his first experiments with computer-generated music were implemented in BASIC on the 8086 XT computer. By age 16 he was a computer power-user, web developer and systems administrator at a local tech company, and graphics designer at a computer game company.

Andy also has a great passion for movement--he enjoys rock climbing, trail running, aerial dance and circus acrobatics, ballet, physical theatre, yoga, pilates and capoeira. His movement is informed by studies of Laban/Bartenieff theory. He is a member of the AscenDance Project dance/climb-fusion performance company.

His favorite programming language is Mathematica, he is a Dvorak typist, and his favorite fruit is the avocado. His heros are Spiderman and Marvin the Depressed Android.