Bios & Program Notes

Creative Coding Collective

The Creative Coding Collective is an ensemble of students from the Performing Arts Technology (PAT) department. The collective designs custom performance systems to explore the intersection of technology and musical expression, building conceptual and practical toolkits for performing music with code. Leveraging programming languages, modular synthesizers, game engines, computer networks, theatrical lighting, and spatial audio, the collective creates original compositions and performances that integrate cutting-edge media technologies. 

Anıl Çamcı 

Anıl Çamcı is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan's Department of Performing Arts Technology. His work deals with worldmaking across a range of media from electronic sound to Virtual Reality. He investigates creativity support and music performance at the intersection of immersive media and human-computer interaction. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois Chicago's Electronic Visualization Lab, where he led research into immersive systems. Prior to this appointment, Çamcı was a faculty member of the Istanbul Technical University, Center for Advanced Studies in Music, where he founded the Sonic Arts Program. His works have been featured throughout the world in leading journals, such as Leonardo Music Journal, Organised Sound, and Journal of New Music Research, as well as conferences, including NIME, CHI, and IEEE VR.

Elois Zelada

Elois Zelada is a media artist, pianist, and composer currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Performing Arts Technology Department at the University of Michigan. She holds a Master's degree in Media Arts from the same institution and a Bachelor's degree in Piano Performance from the Mannes School of Music. Her research focuses on data sonification, immersive media, electronic music, and sound design. Notably, her project "Unnatural Nature," which sonifies climate change data, was showcased at ArtPrize and is currently on display at Kendall College of Art and Design's Spark Gallery in Grand Rapids.

As a pianist, Elois has performed solo and in ensembles, collaborating with the International Contemporary Ensemble and playing at venues like Ernst Stiefel Hall and the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center in New York City. Her work aims to combine music, sound, and technology in ways that encourage reflection around how we interact with our environment.

Emelia Piane

Emelia Piane is currently a senior in the Performing Arts Technology department. She is deeply interested in the intersection of music and activism, using music technology as a tool for empowerment, community building, and creative learning. Her background as a sound engineer allows for deep exploration of electro-acoustic composition, utilizing both traditional recording techniques with sonic manipulation. 

Natalia Quintanilla Cabrera 

Born in Mexico City, Natalia is an electro-acoustic music artist, composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist currently based in Detroit, Michigan. She studied composition and music theory at the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Musicales (CIEM) in Mexico City and is completing her M.A. in Media Arts within the Performing Arts Technology department at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance (SMTD).

Natalia’s music has been performed in prestigious venues across Mexico, the USA, Austria, Slovenia, and the UK. She is interested in immersive sonic experiences, presenting listeners with multiple frames of reference in 3D audio, and exploring the interaction between natural and artificially constructed sound fields.

In 2021, she released music under her solo project name Nati Bu, inspired by electronic and Latin American genres, incorporating acoustic instruments, electronic beats, and synthesizers.

As a performer, Natalia has been involved in Latin American and jazz ensembles, contributing as an accordionist, vocalist, and pianist. At the University of Michigan, she has participated in ensembles such as the Electronic Chamber Music, and the Digital Music Ensemble, and she has performed solo, utilizing sensor-based technology as a key component of her practice.

Ilan Salomon-Jacob
Ilan Salomon-Jacob is a fourth-year student at the University of Michigan pursuing a BFA in Performing Arts Technology and a minor in Computer Science. He specializes in electronic music production, sound design, and creative coding, and is also interested in graphic design and photography. (ilansj.net)

Closer with Inviso (for ambisonics)

Closer is a live performance that utilizes Inviso (http://inviso.cc), a web- based application for creating virtual sonic environments. Throughout the performance, I leverage the unique features of Inviso to construct an explorable 3D sonic environment from scratch, using sounds that have been pre-designed for this performance. The performance showcases an improvised exploration within a 3D compositional space, offering the audience an immersive experimental music experience. 

Zeynep Özcan

Dr. Zeynep Özcan is an experimental and electronic music composer, sound artist and performer. She holds a Ph.D. in Music from Istanbul Technical University, an M.A. in History of Architecture, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Middle East Technical University. She explores biologically inspired musical creativity, interactive and immersive environments, and generative systems. Her works have been performed and presented throughout the world in concerts, exhibitions, and conferences, such as AES, ICAD, ICMC, ISEA, NIME, NYCEMF, WAC and ZKM. s She is an Assistant Professor and a faculty director of Girls in Music and Technology (GiMaT), Summer Institute at the Department of Performing Arts Technology at the University of Michigan, School of Music, Theatre & Dance. She specializes in the implementation of software systems for music-making, audio programming, sonification, sensors and microcontrollers, novel interfaces for musical expression, and large-scale interactive installations. Her research interests are exploring bio-inspired creativity, artistic sonification, playfulness and failure in performance, and sonic cyberfeminisms. She is passionate about community building and creating multicultural and collaborative learning experiences for students through technology-driven creativity.

Self-soothe (2024)

Self-soothe was composed during a summer of solitude. Friendly, familiar melodies mesh with fragmented, harsh, and heavily processed samples. Self-Soothe explores chaos, distraction, stability and regulation. 

Emelia Piane

Emelia Piane is currently a senior in the Performing Arts Technology department. She is deeply interested in the intersection of music and activism, using music technology as a tool for empowerment, community building, and creative learning. Her background as a sound engineer allows for deep exploration of electro-acoustic composition, utilizing both traditional recording techniques with sonic manipulation. 

Inconclusive (2024)
This soundscape piece is composed of snippets I recorded during a soundwalk workshop at GiMaT. The natural soundwalk was interesting because it made me really aware of all the noises around me and the sounds that I make.  My goal for this piece was for it to sound disturbing and a little unresolved, which I tried to achieve by having airy breathing noises and also anxiety creating deep beats. 

Annika Warby

Annika Warby is fifteen years old and a high school sophomore. The Girls in Music and Technology (GiMaT) Summer camp in Summer 2024 was her first opportunity to explore music technology and the related fields. She has been studying violin at the Flint School of Performing Arts for ten years and plays in both the Dort Quartet and the Flint Youth Symphony Orchestra. In addition to her musical pursuits, Annika dances in Flint Youth Ballet and plays travel and varsity soccer. 

Someone is trying to find you (2024)

This piece explores the unique and otherworldly connection between a listener and the voice "within" a record, likening it to an almost seance-like experience. The piece begins with the listener putting on a record and proceeding to move around their home as they engage with the music. There is a kind of magic and grief in transcending time to form or remember an intimate connection with another person. 

Sasha Semina

Sasha Semina is a multimedia artist who specializes in immersive live performance involving audio-reactive projection, extensive sound spatialization, and vocal live-processing techniques. She is a master’s student in Media Arts at the University of Michigan. Her current focus lies in bridging techniques and media from the beginnings of human history to modern day. The ultimate goal of all her work is emotional catharsis. 

Abejas (Bees, 2023)

While hiking in Los Dinamos, a national park in the south of Mexico City, I noticed a bee following me. At first, I felt annoyed by her presence, but then I realized that it was simply my instinct reacting. If I paid closer attention, I could see she was harmless, just minding her own business—fragile and beautiful. In a way, I was the one following her. Eventually, she landed on a flower, and I carefully began to record her.

After reading about the life cycle of a queen bee and its larvae, I was inspired to create a piece that captures the fascinating journey of the selection process of a queen. I generated my material by exploring various sounds from an accordion, along with using the sequencer of an analog synthesizer to create additional textures.

Natalia Quintanilla Cabrera 

Born in Mexico City, Natalia is an electro-acoustic music artist, composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist currently based in Detroit, Michigan. She studied composition and music theory at the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Musicales (CIEM) in Mexico City and is completing her M.A. in Media Arts within the Performing Arts Technology department at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance (SMTD).

Natalia’s music has been performed in prestigious venues across Mexico, the USA, Austria, Slovenia, and the UK. She is interested in immersive sonic experiences, presenting listeners with multiple frames of reference in 3D audio, and exploring the interaction between natural and artificially constructed sound fields.

In 2021, she released music under her solo project name Nati Bu, inspired by electronic and Latin American genres, incorporating acoustic instruments, electronic beats, and synthesizers.

As a performer, Natalia has been involved in Latin American and jazz ensembles, contributing as an accordionist, vocalist, and pianist. At the University of Michigan, she has participated in ensembles such as the Electronic Chamber Music, and the Digital Music Ensemble, and she has performed solo, utilizing sensor-based technology as a key component of her practice.

The Jungle: A Multichannel Drama (2021-22) 

The Jungle: A Multichannel Drama (2021-22) discusses humanity's descent from reason to chaos. Staged through a human traveler's perspective, who embarked on a dramatic journey into rich, exotic foliage, engulfed by a sea of animal growls, murmurs, and occasional ominous clicking, and was gradually transported to an inner space where only they can hear their exclamations and sighs that got closer and closer to a beast’s. Did the protagonist experience the extreme pain of feeling dejected or heartfelt elation of freedom instead? No one knows, perhaps, not even themselves; agony and euphoria are just two faces of a coin that is “insanity”.

The composition/installation is delivered through a static multichannel speaker array as well as a dynamic network of speakers from the portable devices in the audience, connected through the Audio Orchestrator platform over wireless.

Jiawen Mao & Xingmei Zhou

The dynamic duo of Jiawen Mao (PhD student at PAT) and Xingmei Zhou (freelance mixing/mastering engineer and Tonmeister) met at the Master's program in Music Technology at NYU and have been enjoying eccentric banters over coffee and creating sonic experiences ever since. Jiawen is addicted to the symphonic utilization of practically any sound. Xingmei does her mixes with any freakish plugins she can get. Both easily succumb to a trade-off between perfectionism and the time left until the deadline.

Eve's garden (2023) 

The listener is invited to enter into a kind of magical garden of sounds, an ever-evolving environment, where everything is possible — Eve’s garden. Eve is coming from a noisy - huge - impersonal city, suffocating, seeking solace by fashioning her own intimate sanctuary of sound. Organic textures, field-recordings, vocals, and deconstructed rhythms converge to create a sonic landscape that yearns for a nature absent within urban environments. Through spoken or sung words in French and English, her voice takes on an intimate and restrained quality, occasionally breaking free with shouts of liberation. Eve assumes the dual roles of a space's master and a vulnerable captive. A delicate equilibrium is maintained as we teeter between control and destruction, never fully succumbing to extremes.

"Eve’s garden" is an immersive project which can be played live. Here is an acousmatic introduction, a little taste of this sound universe. It embodies a constant sonic fluctuation where time both stretches and accelerates, where the sound material undergoes gradual transformation. The objective is to infuse sound and space with organic qualities, aiming to replicate an artificial sonic garden. It involves the manipulation of micro-movements as well as stable environments, to make the whole sounds wide, narrow, or even in the head. I am working with micro-temporal decorrelation between channels, spectral spatialisation, precise localizations, but also playing with different spatial sound reproduction techniques to create contrasts (Ambisonics, VBAP, stereo and mono). 


Sound and space as springboards for the imagination, as antidotes for regeneration, as an escape from the external chaos.

Amélie Nilles 

Amélie Nilles is a French composer and spatial audio expert from Paris, drawing inspiration from her background in singing and drumming on the jazz music scenes. Explorer of experimental realms, she offers an aesthetic approach to spatialisation in her music. Under the guidance of composer Régis Renouard-Larivière, she honed her skills in electroacoustic composition, while she was simultaneously pursuing her Master's degree at Paris 8 University, delving into research exploring the spatial dimension of music. Constantly in the process of creating sound environments, she crafts captivating soundscapes weaving together her voice, field recordings, electronic textures, and organic rhythms. In November 2021, she unveiled her debut EP, 'A croqué le fruit étrange', on Planisphère label, introducing listeners to her deeply personal and experimental universe, both dark and pop. Since then, she has performed live at various venues across Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Portugal and Slovenia ; has designed multichannel sound installations, collaborating with diverse artists along the way. Among the themes dear to her, she challenges the intrusion of technology in every aspect of our lives without ever questioning it. While we tend to forget that humans are living beings among others, she advocates for a re-humanization of society, in opposition to trans-humanism. 

All Of It (2023)

All Of It attempts to embrace everything all at once and reacts to a period of hypermobility and parallel re-understandings of notions of home and routine. It suggests that there is beauty in effort as well as futility. All Of It is comprised of field recordings and voice memos taken by the composer while in transit or working with other musicians over the past few years. It houses a variety of musical styles and structures that sum to a characteristic whole.

Mike Mulshine

Mike Mulshine is a composer-songwriter-performer and music technologist whose work centrally explores how humans relate to each other and the modern technological world around them. He produces interactive audiovisual works that aim to expose accessible, engaging, and empowering new modes of experiencing or (co-) creating media. These range from web-based interactive albums to physical sound installations and experimental compositions that blend vernacular and formal elements. He worked with Dan Trueman and Jeff Snyder at Princeton University (BA 2016) and is currently pursuing a PhD in Computer- Based Music Theory and Acoustics and a Diploma in Music Composition at Stanford University where he is advised by Ge Wang and Patricia Alessandrini.  

Through My Fault (2022, 2024 version) 

Rhythm, lights, and shadows; micro-details, grains, and noises; overlapped layers and textures in a simulated space. "Through My Fault" (English for the Latin phrase "Mea culpa") navigates through a blend of discrete clicks and continuous noises, moving dynamically across simulated spaces from close proximity to distant expanses. The piece was created exclusively using granular synthesis in the Pure Data programming language (developed by Miller Puckette since 1996). Each sound grain originates from filtered white noise, processed through a bank of resonant frequencies inspired by vocal tract formants.

Damián Anache 

Damián Anache (1981) is an Argentine artist based in Buenos Aires. His sound pieces and videos explore non-narrative expressions, micro-details, noise, and geometry. Some of his productions have been presented in various international venues. His debut album, "Capturas del Único Camino" (2014, 2016), was released by labels such as Concepto Cero (ARG), Inkilino Records (ARG), Already Dead Tapes (USA), and Must Die Records (GBR). In 2019, he compiled and published the book "Tekné: Apropiaciones desde el arte actual" through the Alfonso y Luz Castillo Foundation. In 2024, he released the piece "Compre(hen)ssion of Artifacts'' in physical format (floppy disk) through Strudelsoft label (CAN), as a video on the glitch.art.br platform, and as an NFT on Zora.co. In addition to his artistic career, Damián works as a professor at the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) and the National University of Quilmes (UNQ), where he has also been involved in research since 2007. He holds a PhD in Social and Human Sciences (UNQ, 2017), a Specialization in Sound Applied to Digital Arts (Postgraduate, National University of the Arts, 2015), and a Bachelor's degree in Composition with Electroacoustic Media (UNQ, 2010). He has received study grants from the following institutions: CONICET (2015-17), UNQ Postgraduate Secretariat (2014-15), National University of the Arts (2012-14), and UNQ Research Secretariat (2009-10).

La porta nel dado (2023)

La porta nel dado is an electroacoustic ambisonic composition that explores the theme of creation from destruction, taking the listener on a transformative journey within an immersive soundscape.

Inspired by Pierre Henry's Variations pour une porte et un soupir from 1963, the piece begins with familiar soundscapes that take on a different form and meaning through the spatialisation techniques employed. As the soundscape progresses, the initial sonic elements are completely deconstructed and destroyed, leaving behind a small, bristling sphere. This sphere then unfolds into space, filling the entire ambisonic sphere and creating new, ever-changing rhythmic patterns. The composition continues to evolve as the rhythms undergo a series of transformations, eventually collapsing until something seemingly different emerges at the top of the sphere, still resembling the rhythms from before, but with completely new material.

Throughout the creative process, the primary challenge was to seamlessly weave together disparate sonic materials while maintaining a coherent overarching narrative of creating something new out of destruction, opening doors from order to chaos and back again.

Jakob Gille

Jakob Gille began his formal education at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden, where he studied composition and music theory. His passion for sound and experimentation led him to institutions such as the ZKM Karlsruhe and the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. There, he worked with the Akusmonium GRM Paris and the Studio für elektronische Musik HfM Dresden respectively. Jakob Gille is the driving force behind Into Sound, an initiative that has organised multiple concerts in Berlin for 3D loudspeaker setups since its inception in 2018. Currently, he is pursuing a master's degree in computer music and sound art at KUG & IEM Graz. His compositions have been played several times at the Medium Sonorum concert at the Ars Electronica Linz, in Ústí nad Labem in combination with the Ambisonics Summer School 2023, at the Festival Izis in Koper and the Apnées Festival in Grenoble. In 2023, he won an honorable mention at ISAC in Pesaro. 

Conquer the Suffering 

Conquer the Suffering is a musical exploration that draws inspiration from Nepali diverse musical traditions, capturing its spiritual soundscapes, cultural nuances, and the people's resilience. This composition is constructed from the sounds of traditional Nepali and Tibetan Buddhist ritual instruments, soulful vocals, and nuanced electronic elements. The legendary ARP 2500 synthesizer introduces a complementary span across a wide variety of instrumentations, media, and interdisciplinary collaborations, yet distinguished sonic dimensions, creating a meaningful dialogue between East and West, as well as electronic and acoustic elements. The piece reflects the thematic core of resilience in the face of conflicts and challenges. The music mirrors the diverse range of human emotions, from moments of introspection to the triumphant spirit of overcoming adversity, fear, and sadness. Listeners are encouraged to immerse themselves and meditate within the soundscape of Nepal (representing enlightenment and spiritual practice), merging with imaginary electric sounds (representing human conditions).

Cecilia Wu 

Dr. Jiayue Cecilia Wu, a scholar, composer, and audio engineer, specializes in harnessing music technology for healing. She is an Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Director of Recording Arts at the University of Colorado Denver. She is the chairperson of the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Committee and the Governor of Audio Engineering Society (AES). She served as a voting member of the Recording Academy (GRAMMY) and the board director-at-large at the International Computer Music Association (ICMA).

Where Water Meets Memory (2021)

I. The Bay (Of Trains and Shorebirds) w/ solo violin

II. The Reef (Of Predator and Prey) w/ cello, piano, glockenspiel

III. The Ocean (The Lull of the Sirens) w/ soprano soloists, choir

IV. The Deep (Beneath the Rain) w/ string quartet, orchestra

During the summers of 2018 and 2019, I spent time at the Anheuser-Busch Coastal Research Center (Oyster, Virginia), recording sounds including oyster reefs. Since that experience, I have thought about my lifelong relationship to water: trips to the beach as a child, a fear of deep, dark water (thalassophobia), recent collaboration with environmental scientists researching sea life, and, of course, the rising of our oceans as a function of global warming.

All of these experiences swirled around compositionally for a year or two, until I began working on this piece in earnest during the beginning of 2021, while holed up in Oberlin, Ohio during the COVID-19 pandemic. Creating this work, I challenged myself in several ways: to use a completely higher-order ambisonic workflow, to incorporate recorded or sampled instruments in each section, and to work in a number of different electroacoustic styles. The resulting work is for full 3D higher order ambisonics, presented here as a third order rendering.

Includes performance recordings of David Bowlin, violin, Kate Copeland, soprano, and Kevin William Davis, cello.

Eli Stine 

Eli Stine is a media artist, software engineer, and educator currently working as a Software Engineer at Meta (formerly Facebook) Reality Labs - Research. Prior to that, Stine was a Professor of Computer Music & Digital Arts at Oberlin Conservatory. Stine received Ph.D. and Masters degrees in Composition and Computer Technologies as a Jefferson Fellow at the University of Virginia and bachelor’s degrees in Technology In Music And Related Arts and Computer Science from Oberlin College and Oberlin Conservatory.

Stine's work explores electroacoustic sound, multimedia technologies (often custom-built software, video projection, and multi-channel speaker systems), and collaboration between disciplines (artistic and otherwise). This work has been mentioned in publications including the New York Times, USA Today, The Wire, The Economist, and on NPR, and has toured Europe, Asia, and India.

Résurrecson (2023) 

Completed in summer 2023, Résurrecson is the pursuit of a triptych of pieces questioning fixed media and its close relationship with the composer.With the octophonic support, this piece responds to the impetus of space suggested in the previous piece of the triptych. This space is created around a parallel between the violence of the words of certain children and the rawness of certain synthetic sounds. Résurrecson is composed in three movements, the space explored is the space of a greater depth of field (like photography) allowed by the octophonic support rather than trajectories or movements. The main sound sources are essentially synthetic, coming from software modular environnements articulated by two field recordings. One corresponds to children insulting each other at the beach of my hometown and the other was taken at the Paris zoo. The whole work was composed a bit particularly because it has been only made from octophonic files without any spatialization plugins. Most of my octophonic files have been assembled by hand from monophonic, stereophonic or even LCR files.

(Poem, FR) : Enfants accompagnés, de ces déluges qui ne laissent pas connaître leurs noms. Hurlez et insultez, la conscience du danger, la découverte de la passion. Décidément dissimulez, l'endurance atroce qui supporte ces compagnons.

Silence.

Valentin Sismann 

Valentin Sismann is a French acousmatic music composer and video artist. After making the film In Repetito Religare with Audrey Colard, he decided to combine electroacoustic and video art in his practice. His work has been presented in Europe, Latin America, Asia and the United States in group exhibitions, screenings and concerts. In 2024, he won the DJTAL Humain prize for his video Screensong and the petites formes prize for his acousmatic piece Loinaître. 

Before the Rainbow

Before the Rainbow generates an ambient, yet active soundscape. The piece meditates on sounds and rhythms from nature like wind, waves, raindrops, creatures, but the work is entirely synthesized from only streams of pink noise. Using virtual analog synthesis (VCV Rack), layers of modulated filtering and randomly generated pulses shape the work and a sparse aleatoric tonal scheme is introduced using filter resonance and comb filtering. Spatialization is also generated using modulation of panning parameters. The work’s processes can run live without ever repeating or looping, and only minor mixing and editing was used to shape this fixed version - staying close to the generative concept. It is hoped that the music offers a thoughtful experience that reminds listeners of the complexity and beauty of the environmental soundscapes we hear in our daily lives.

Jame Moses 

Jim Moses is an audio producer, composer, sound designer, engineer, and educator. He has worked extensively in electronic/experimental music, and sound design, producing and engineering for music, radio, theater and multimedia. He is currently senior lecturer and technical director at the Brown University Department of Music. Compositions and sound designs include work presented by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), Providence Firstworks, The Acoustical Society of America, The New Jersey Opera Festival, Providence Black Rep, and The Princeton Composers Ensemble. Broadcast and recording credits include NPR, PRI, PRX, Rhode Island Public Radio, WBUR (Boston, Ma), New Focus Recordings, Musicmasters/BMG, Bridge Records, Composers Recordings Inc., Lyricord, and GM Recordings.  

Un dado roído (A gnawed dice, 2023)

Un dado roído (A gnawed dice) is a piece I composed for the newly established AcusmaLab studio inside the Arts Faculty of Universidad de Chile, the first studio in the country with the capability of third order ambisonic reproduction. The title comes from a Cesar Vallejo poem, Los Dados Eternos, and has an acousmatic style inspired by composer and teacher Federico Schumacher. The vast majority of the piece consists of one particular sound source which twists and turns and whose properties orient both the structure of the piece as a whole as well as every emerging musical cell.

Lucas Fuentes Vergara 

Lucas Fuentes Vergara is a Chilean sound engineer and composer who specializes in immersive sound and room acoustics. He has worked in designing and building studios for immersive sound, video game sound design, and composition. In composition, he has a special interest for the exploration of recorded sound in an acousmatic style. He has a degree in Sound Engineering from Universidad de Chile.  

Qualia (2017)

Qualia was composed at CEMI studios – Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia at the University of North Texas in 2017. The composition explores the experience of music from perception to sensation; the physical process during which our sensory organs – those involved with sound, tactility, and vision in particular – respond to musically organized sound stimuli. Through this deep connection, sound, space, and audience are all engaged in a multidimensional experience. The motion and the meaning inherited in the sounds are not disconnected from the sounds and are not the reason for the sounds but are, in fact, the sound altogether. Energy, movement, and timbre become one; sound source identification, cause guessing, sound energies, gesture decoding, and extra-musical connotations are not independent of the sound but vital internal components of it. Qualia are claimed to be individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The way it feels to have mental states such as hearing frequencies at the lower threshold of human hearing or a piercing sound, hearing a Bb note from a ship horn, as well as the granularity of a recorded sound.

Panayiotis Kokoras 

Panayiotis Kokoras is an internationally award-winning composer and computer music innovator, and currently Regents Professor of composition and CEMI director (Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia) at the University of North Texas. Born in Greece, he underwent formal training in classical guitar and composition in Athens (Dip), Greece, and later in York, England (MA, PhD). He taught for many years at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. Kokoras's sound compositions use sound as the only structural unit. His concept of "holophonic musical texture" describes his goal that each independent sound (phonos), contributes equally into the synthesis of the total (holos). In both instrumental and electroacoustic writing, his music calls upon a "virtuosity of sound," a hyper-idiomatic writing which emphasizes on the precise production of variable sound possibilities and the correct distinction between one timbre and another to convey the musical ideas and structure of the piece. His compositional oeuvre draws inspiration from his in-depth exploration of domains such as Sound Composition, Spatial Sound, Mixed Music, Electroacoustic Music, Holophonic Musical Texture, Extended Techniques, Fab Synthesis, Music Information Retrieval compositional strategies, Tactile Sound, Instrumental Prosthetics, Robotics, Sound and Consciousness. Kokoras's works have received significant recognition, with commissions and fellowships from renowned institutions and festivals including the Guggenheim Foundation (USA), Fromm Music Foundation (Harvard), IRCAM (France), MATA (New York), Gaudeamus (Netherlands), ZKM (Germany), and IMEB (France), among others. His compositions have graced over 1100 performances across the globe, amassing an impressive array of 95 awards and distinctions in international competitions. His compositions have consistently been chosen by juries from over 320 international calls for music. He stands as a founding member of the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers Association (HELMCA) and held positions including board member and president from 2004 to 2012. Presently, he assumes the role of President of the International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music (ICEM). He also served as conference chair for the ICMC 2015 and SMC 2018 and regularly serves as jury member in composition competitions and conferences.

Karst Grotto (2017)

The title Karst Grotto — chosen for its onomatopoeic qualities and its direct references to landscape types, as well as geological spatial structures and processes — reflects the sound world of the work. Karst, a particular topography, is created by the dissolution of soluble rock types from their contact with acidic rain water. A microlevel chemical process characterizes the morphology of entire landscapes and results in complex networks of small-scale — micro-space — features and textures like fissure and rillenkarrens.
Karst Grotto was realized at the studios of the Department of Music Technology and Acoustics Engineering of the Technological Educational Institute of Crete (Greece) and the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology (ICST) of the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK) in Zurich (Switzerland), between July 2016 and January 2017, and premiered on November 4, 2017 during the Sound Junction concert series in Sheffield (UK). Many thanks to Johannes Schütt for his guidance and support. Karst Grotto was awarded the 2nd prize in the electronic music category at Computer Space (Sofia, Bulgaria, 2018) and a Special Mention at the 10th Biennial Acousmatic Composition Competition Métamorphoses (Belgium, 2018).

Nikos Stavropoulos

Nikos Stavropoulos (Athens, Greece, 1975) is a composer of predominantly acousmatic and mixed music. He read music at the University of Wales (Bangor, Wales, UK), where he studied composition with Andrew Lewis and completed a doctorate at the University of Sheffield (England, UK) under the supervision of Adrian Moore.

His music is performed and broadcast regularly around the world and has been awarded internationally on several occasions. His practice is concerned with notions of tangibility and immersivity in acousmatic experiences and the articulation of acoustic space, in the pursuit of probable aural impossibilities.

Since 2006, he has been a member of the Music, Sound & Performance Group at Leeds Beckett University (Leeds, England, UK), where he is a Professor in Composition and lectures on Electroacoustic Music. He is a founding member of the Echochroma New Music Research Group, a member of the British ElectroAcoustic Network (BEAN) and the Hellenic Electroacoustic Music Composers Association (HELMCA).  

Automata: Mechanical Garden  (2010)

The word ‘automata’ (plural: ‘automaton’ or ‘automatons’) is derived from the Greek word ‘automatos,’ meaning ‘acting of itself.’ The notion of autonomous mechanical processes has always interested mankind. In the Hellenistic world, complex mechanical devices are known to have existed and used as toys, religious idols, or tools to demonstrate basic scientific principles. As more elaborate automata could be built in the 18th C., sound effects also became increasingly more important in order to make the automata seem more realistic. Many of them represented mundane figures, such as musicians playing instruments, magicians, or birds singing. Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782), who studied music, medicine, and physics, created a life-size mechanical duck that not only looked and moved like a duck, but also ‘quacked’ like a duck, and digested and produced droppings like a duck after being fed. In this work, old and new automata and mechanical toys are left in an imaginary garden where they are brought to life and allowed to operate freely according to their own imagination.

This work is dedicated to Folkmar Hein, the long-standing Director of the Electronic Studio of the TU Berlin (1974-2009). This work was originally written for a multi-channel live diffusion and premiered using the 100+ speaker system, BEAST system, by the University of Birmingham.

Kotoka Suzuki (鈴木琴香)

Kotoka Suzuki (鈴木琴香) is a composer focusing on both instrumental and multimedia practices. She has produced several large-scale multimedia works, including spatial interactive audio-visual work for both concert and installation settings, often in collaboration with artists and scholars from other disciplines. Her work reflects on life, breath, and wind and often conceives of sounds as a physical form to be manipulated through the sculptural practice of composition.

Her work has been featured internationally by performers such as Arditti String Quartet, eighth blackbird, Pacifica Quartet, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, and Mendelssohn Chamber Orchestra (Germany), at numerous venues and broadcasts such as Deutschland Radio, BBC Radio3, Ultraschall (Germany), ISCM World Music Days, The Stone, ZKM Media Museum (Germany), Royal College of Music (Sweden), and Music at the Anthology (MATA). Among the awards she has received include DAAD Berlin Artists in Residence Program (Germany), Global Music Awards Gold Medal, New Music USA, Bourges First Prize in Multimedia, International Electro-Acoustic Musica Nova Competition First Prize, George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, and Robert Fleming Prize from Canada Council for the Arts. She has held residencies at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Djerassi, Ucross, and Center for Arts and Media (ZKM). She received a B.M. degree in composition from Indiana University and a D.M.A. degree in composition at Stanford University, where she studied with Jonathan Harvey. She taught at the University of Chicago and Arizona State University and is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough with a graduate appointment at the Faculty of Music. Her work is published on Starkland, Edition RZ, Edition DEGEM, EMF Media, and IMEB records. She is an associate composer at the Canadian Music Centre since 2001.

Bucolic & Broken (2016-17)

This piece is an ode to the fragile beauty of post-industrial rural England: crumbling in this Brexit era (since way before, some might say) yet still holding together by some strange magic, or by force of habit. It is a sonic commentary on my new home, the North, which is in fact in the middle of the island that forms most of the country in which I settled with my family many years ago: a divided kingdom.

It is a sort of anxious love song contemplating the area’s bucolic beauty, with its protected moors, its omnipresent stone walls dividing minuscule allotments, its fashionably converted factories, its refreshing replanted forests; all intermingled with mementos of a more prosperous era: the unkempt gardens, the ash-stained walls, the many broken windows (when not actually bricked up), the closed shops in cheap architectural atrocities... On the one hand, the orange colour of the sunlight gives to nature’s greenery a pictorial shade; on the other hand, the frequent cloud ceiling mixes everything into a soup of brown and grey.

It is also an affectionate nod to its people, with their resilience, composure, and stoicism, where a cup of tea seems to put everything into perspective. Anywhere else, such a division would create chaos and unrest. Here, it seems as though everyone is taking a deep breath, pausing to observe the waters, before taking the plunge.

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay (Montréal, 1975) is a composer and performer on bass guitar and electronic devices, in solo and group settings, between electroacoustic music, contemporary jazz, mixed music and improvised music. He also worked in popular music, and practises creative coding. His music is available on empreintes DIGITALes.

He studied composition with Michel Tétreault, Marcelle Deschênes, and Jonty Harrison; bass guitar with Jean-Guy Larin, Sylvain Bolduc, and Michel Donato; analysis with Michel Longtin, and Stéphane Roy; studio technique with Francis Dhomont, Robert Normandeau, and Jean Piché.

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay is currently Professor of Composition and Improvisation at the University of Huddersfield (England, UK). He likes spending time with his family, reading prose, and going on long walks. As a founding member of the no-tv collective, he does not own a working television set. 

In Summer Rain (2021)

In Summer Rain explores the sound of a rain storm, from realistic soundscape to remote transformations. Rilke’s poem, “Before Summer Rain,” evokes the odd feeling we get when we sense that rain is coming. My piece begins like this, in a typical suburban setting, but soon the downpour rushes us into an imaginary interior world, where harmony colors the rhythm of rainfall, and thunder and lightning take on new forms.

This is one of a series of my pieces that weaves in and out of natural soundscape, using it to prompt memories and associations while experimenting with its ability to take on harmonic color and animate rhythm. I think of this music as a form of magical realism, and I hope listeners enjoy entering and leaving the make-believe realm.

Much of the pitched sound you will hear comes from recordings of rainfall, subjected to precisely tuned filters and a process of spectral analysis and recomposition.

John Gibson 

John Gibson composes electronic music, which he often combines with instrumental soloists or ensembles. He also creates fixed-media audio or audiovisual works that focus on environmental soundscape. His portrait CD, Traces, is available on the Innova label, along with other recordings on the Centaur, Everglade, Innova, and SEAMUS labels. Audiences across the world have heard his music, in venues including the D-22 punk rock club in Beijing, the Palazzo Pisani in Venice, and the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. Presentations of his electroacoustic music include concerts at the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, the Bourges Synthèse Festival in France, the Brazilian Symposium on Computer Music, the Australasian Computer Music Conference, and many ICMC and SEAMUS conferences. Gibson is associate professor of music and director of the Center for Electronic and Computer Music (cecm.indiana.edu) at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. 

Prolation Study in Metal (2018)

A prolation canon of wind chimes serves as a ritornello for a larger exploration of motion and immersion through metallic samples (also including samples of waterphone, thundersheets, singing bowls, and an unusual iron spiral-staircase from my parent’s home in rural Vermont). In composing this piece, I explored techniques I would describe as “analog spatial sampling”; much of the 3D spatial elements were achieved through soundfield recordings –setting up objects around/above/below a soundfield mic, then improvising– combining these sounds with the more conventional approach of panning/mixing sampled sounds into the soundfield in the studio.

Peter Van Zandt Lane

Peter Van Zandt Lane’s music has been described as “incisive... beautifully and confidently made... as inviting as it is sophisticated” (American Academy of Arts and Letters) and “refreshingly relevant” (New York Times). He composes acoustic and electroacoustic concert music that draws from an eclectic musical background, chipping away at boundaries between his classical training and experiences in rock, hip-hop, and EDM, creating pieces that often reflect critically on the subject of technology in society. A recipient of the 2020 MTNA Distinguished Composer of the Year Award and a 2018 Charles Ives Fellowship, Peter has received fellowships from Copland House, Composers Now, Yaddo, and MacDowell Colony, among others. Recent works include Radix Tyrannis, a concerto for Joseph Alessi commissioned by American Chamber Winds, Piano Quartet: The Longitude Problem commissioned by the Atlanta Chamber Players, and Chamber Symphony commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for EQ Ensemble (Boston). His electroacoustic ballet, HackPolitik (one of two award-winning collaborations with choreographer Kate Ladenheim) was a New York Times Critic’s Pick, receiving international press attention for exploring cyber-activism through music and dance. Peter is currently Associate Professor of Composition at the University of Georgia.

SUMAHO SAKEBI

SUMAHO SAKEBI (“smartphone screams”) is a collage of recordings of sonification of the electromagnetic fields generated by our smartphones. These fields are invisible (and inaudible), but are ubiquitous in our modern environment, and, in this piece. we can hear the chattering of a device that is perhaps sitting in your pocket right now.

Simon Hutchinson

Simon Hutchinson is a composer and interdisciplinary artist who uses technology as both a creative medium and a thematic focus. His work emphasizes the human dimensions of technology, challenging contemporary technoculture and advocating for a thoughtful approach to our digital age.

Simon’s works draw inspiration from diverse sources, weaving together European concert traditions, creative electronics, and a range of global influences. The result is in a body of work that explores the variety of interplay between humanity, technology, and society.

Weightless (2023) 

Weightlessis a spatial electroacoustic piece made for ambisonic system. The piece is inspired by the choreographic principles of Rudolf von Laban’s Effort theory. The piece uses manipulated field recordings, instrumental- and vocal recordings with a fresh connection to the philosophy of musique concrète. The movement of each sound object expresses weightless movement behavior based on Laban’s studies of human movement and dance. The piece was awarded a 2nd place in The International Sonosfera Ambisonic Competition, First honorable mention in CIME competition 2023 and it is in the finals for Prix Russolo 2023. 

Otto Iivari 

Otto Iivari is Finnish electroacoustic composer and a doctoral student in the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. His focus lies in the acousmatic, spatial electroacoustic music, designed for multichannel settings and ambisonic systems. Iivari likes to explore the potential of organic sound, emphasizing space and sound movement in his compositions. In his creative work he investigates the interconnectedness of expressive human movement and the perceived movement of sound. His piece Thở won the 2022 Europe's sixth Student 3D Audio competition in the category of contemporary/ computer music and Weightless secured the 2nd place at the 2023 International Sonosfera Ambisonic Competition, the first honorable mention in CIME competition 2023 and reached the finals for Prix Russolo 2023.  

Pheonix and Firewhip (2018) 

South of the equatorial plane, near the great Cleft scarring the continent called Aquila (named after its eagle-shaped form), lies an unusual biome that has evolved to generate and survive great discharges of energy and fire. The forest is dominated by tesla trees, which under certain meteorological conditions, violently release explosions and lighting bolts of static electricity that ignite massive wildfires across the Pinion Plateau. Only the hardiest lifeforms like phoenix shrub, firewhip, amber lambent, glowbirds, and multihued gossamers are witnesses to the volatile conditions of these flame forests.

The materials used in this piece are inspired by Dan Simmons’s novel Hyperion and were produced using ambisonic and binaural techniques. 

Seth Shafer

Seth Shafer is a composer and researcher whose work hybridizes technology, new media, and art/science. His artistic practice represents musical exploration at the extreme edge of performance where he often looks for opportunities to explore ephemerality and multiplicity. This often involves performance situations that have limited or impossible rehearsal scenarios, purposeful impediments to ensemble coordination, live sight-reading, and unavoidable failure. Seth is Assistant Professor of Music at California State University San Marcos and holds degrees from the University of North Texas and California State University, Long Beach. 

Wild Living (2020)

I. Cave Swallow

II. Song Sparrow

III. Bornean Frogmouth

IV. Song Sparrow reprise 

V. Elf Owl

Wild Living (2020) for six voices was composed from field recordings of birds and other wild life. I listened through these field recordings at extremely slow playback rates. Much like the speech-to-song illusion where points of speech can sound like a melody, I discovered interesting moments of music that were then approximated to pitches and duration values and used as musical motives. The piece is in five short movements and was composed for the sextet vocal group Variant 6. This version is mixed in 3rd order ambisonics.

Performed by Variant 6 in 2020: 

Katy Avery
Steven Bradshaw
Rebecca Myers

Jimmy Reese 

Daniel Schwartz 

Elisa Sutherland

Recorded by Charles Mueller. 

Mixed by Hassan Estakhrian

Hassan Estakhrian

Hassan Estakhrian is a cross-disciplinary musician based in California. He works as a composer, performer, songwriter, intermedia artist, producer, music technologist, audio engineer, and educator. Hassan performs and records on multiple instruments, including voice, electric bass, guitar, keyboards, drum set, and others. He collides genres of rock, funk, jazz, electronica, and contemporary classical, sometimes integrating various technologies and media to create large scale intermedia works. His body of work includes rock operas, chamber pieces, games with adaptive graphic scores, structured improvisation, and intermedia stories based in fantasy and science fiction. As a technologist and audio engineer, Hassan produces records in the studio and immersive mixes, develops tools for music production, compositional aid, and live performance, and does research in virtual acoustics and immersive audio.

Hassan directs his band Antenna Fuzz and is one-half of experimental-pop duo Meoark. He also works with a variety of artists across genres and media. He has performed and recorded with rock bands such as Valerian Sun and contemporary ensembles like Dal Niente. As a composer and performer, he has written for ensembles such as JACK Quartet, Tak Ensemble, WasteLAnd, Variant 6, and Kukuruz Quartet. His work has been performed in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Hassan holds a DMA from Stanford University and lectures at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He also helps maintain and develop CCRMA’s virtual acoustics system (CAVIAR) and manages its recording studio. More info at antennafuzz.com.

Funeral for a Whale (2023)

Funeral for a Whale developed from my curiosity regarding the funeral practices of whales and other marine mammals, some of whom carry their deceased relative’s body for days as a manifestation of their mourning. Sometimes, whales and dolphins will even keep vigils around their deceased family members or companions. I found this at once so strange and uncanny, and yet also so immediately relatable as a communal expression of grief and loss. This piece is an attempt to imagine that space of grief and reflect on their ceremonies of remembrance. I often feel reluctant to impose a narrative on my music for fear of it being too restrictive for listeners. My goal when creating music is always to encourage reflection and imagination, not to be too overly prescriptive regarding what the music is really about. My hope is that Funeral for a Whale can reconcile my anxieties by offering some context for the piece as I was creating it, while still inviting listeners to weave together a story of their own.

Matias Vilaplana Stark

Matias Vilaplana Stark is a Chilean music technologist, composer, and improviser. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Composition and Computer Technologies program at the University of Virginia. His research interests lie at the intersection of immersive media and musical practice, working on designing interactive music environments with virtual reality systems and the creation of 3D virtual environments as graphic scores for musical improvisation. He holds a B.F.A. from the music technology program at Universidad de Chile, and an M.A. in media arts from the University of Michigan. In Santiago, he worked as a recording engineer and sound designer, collaborating with various artists in dance, theater, and visual arts projects. At Michigan, he focused on creating music using movement-based interactive systems with motion capture technology. In his music, field recordings, sound synthesis, and samples from musical instruments are combined through different processing and editing techniques to blur the lines between real-world and abstract sounds, producing fictional soundscapes that cross over into the magical realm. 

Inner outer self-variation and my deranged disembodied voices (2023)

Auditory hallucinations are the base for this immersive 3D musical work. These are the  most common type of hallucinations. They can be defined as the perception of sounds  without an external acoustic source. Sometimes the person that experiences them can  have a relatively normal life. Other times, auditory hallucinations can disturb everyday life. The work intends to give the audience the experience of people suffering from  auditory hallucinations. 

There are several types of auditory hallucinations divided into two big categories. These  are verbal and non-verbal hallucinations. These categories include hearing a voice  talking about its thoughts, a voice narrating its actions, thought echo, environment  echo, tinnitus, hissing, machine noises, a high-tension wire, whistling, animal sounds,  and even musical hallucinations, among many others.1 

This fascinating auditory concept will constitute the sound material of the work. It will be explored through the performers, their instruments, AI generated voices,  synthesizers, field recordings, digital processing, and the 3D immersive monitoring  system. During the performance, the aim is to bring tensions between the inner and  outer self of the audience, confusing them with provoked auditory hallucinations and  maybe for some time producing a state of paranoia. 

The original performance deploys acoustic and electronic sources from The Black Page Orchestra, a surround speaker array, and open headphones for all the audience. I denominated this setup as Hybrid Audio Diffusion System (HADS) that makes possible  to create and perceive an augmented 3D immersive sonic experience. For this  electronic version there are no acoustic instruments and the binaural sound field that  was on the Headphones is mixed for the speaker array. 

Enrique Mendoza

Born in Mexico City and based in Vienna, Enrique Mendoza is an electroacoustic music artist specialising in composition, live electronics, and sound diffusion in Spatial Audio.  His work integrates analog synthesizers, custom software, 3D immersive music  technology, and multi-channel systems to create expanded sonic experiences. Enrique has received commissions, awards, and grants from institutions and  ensembles across Europe, the USA, Asia, South America, and Mexico. Since 2019, he  has been a professor at the National School of Cinematographic Arts, UNAM, MX.  Enrique holds a Master’s degree from the Conservatory of Amsterdam. He is pursuing a  Doctor of Arts degree at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz, Austria, where he  also lectures in Digital Music Techniques. His research is at the forefront of  electroacoustic music composition for Hybrid Audio Diffusion Systems. 

Weaves of Weaving Mirrors (2021)

Waves of Weaving Mirrors is a solo work for voice, Array mbira, autoharp, QChord, Theremini, electronics. Christina Wheeler composed the work, created the third-order ambisonic sound design using Envelop for Live, and performed the piece as one continuous take with no additional edits. This solo performance was recorded Berlin, Germany.

Christina Wheeler 

Christina Wheeler is a composer, vocalist, musician, and multimedia artist whose creative practice focuses on electronics and technology. Wheeler blends a mix of structured and improvised electronic music and sound design from voice, sampler, QChord, autoharp, Array mbira, and Theremini. Projects span solo song-cycle series, solo instrumental improvisational compositions, immersive solo and ensemble-based multimedia performance and generative installation projects. Collaborators have included Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Chris Abrahams, Dudù Kouate, Chris Abrahams, The Bakol, (with Greg Tate and Satch Hoyt), Laraaji, Vernon Reid, and Hprizm/Priest. Bands included Wiremouth, Floating People, and BlowOut.

A Los Angeles native, Wheeler has performed and recorded internationally with Ryuichi Sakamoto, John Cale, Laraaji, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Matana Roberts, Marc Ribot, Murcof, Zeena Parkins, John Carter, Fred Hopkins, and many more. Wheeler’s work with David Byrne included international tours and appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and PBS’s Sessions at West 54th Street. MTV’s AMP featured Wheeler’s music.

Wheeler has presented at Lincoln Center and the Berlin Philharmonie, and collaborated with choreographers Sally Silvers and Jodi Melnick. Recordings span work with Fred P, Benjamin Brunn, Shinedoe, Ripperton, Vernon Reid, Mocky, Jamie Lidell, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Opera performances include Sekou Sundiata and Craig Harris’ The Return of Elijah, the African and Rob Mazurek’s The Book of Sound at Sons d’Hiver Festival. Wheeler premiered as a soloist in Krists Auzniek’s Four Angles.

Festival commissions include Bang on a Can, Märzmusik, and CTM, which premiered The Totality of Blackness Trilogy. Solo releases include That Was Then, This Is Now, and Songs of S + D. Artist residencies include Cité Internationale des Arts, Harvestworks Media Arts Center, and Akademie der Künste. Wheeler continues to develop and present new immersive, multimedia works, and compose for numerous, instruments, including the glass armonica, kora, and balafon.