Douglas Geers
(Sonic Arts program Director)
Douglas Geers is a composer who uses technology in nearly all of his works, whether in the compositional process, as part of their sonic realization, or both. He has created concert music, installation works, and several large multimedia theater works. He also performs as an improviser, playing laptop and his own custom electronic instruments.
Geers’s music has been performed and installations exhibited in a wide range of venues across the world and on a wide range of concerts and festivals. Groups that have performed Geers’s music include Ensemble Fa, The Radio-Television Orchestra of Slovenia, the Princeton University Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), Speculum Musicae, Ensemble Pi, the NODUS Ensemble, the Verge Ensemble, the NEXt Ens, ConTempo, Miolina, Zeitgeist, The New York University New Music Ensemble, Choral Chameleon, the University of Minnesota Singers, the Richmond University Chorale, the Ball State University Concert Choir, the Western Michigan University Chorale, the First Parish Brookline Choir, and the Dessoff Choirs. Performers include Esther Lamneck, Blair McMillen, Madeleine Shapiro, Keith Kirchoff, Maja Cerar, Jinsoo Lim, Lisa Bahn, Saul Bitran, Jed Distler, Kamala Sankaram, Shiau-uen Ding, Junpei Ohtsubo, Darryn Zimmer, Matthew Polashek, and Greg Beyer.
Geers is a Professor of Music at Brooklyn College, a campus of the City University of New York (CUNY). There he is Director of the Center for Computer Music and the MFA program in Sonic Arts. He also serves on the Ph.D. composition faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center. As an educator, Geers teaches music composition, electroacoustic music, interactive music and media creation with Max/MSP and Arduino/micro:bit, electronic music history, and hardware electronics for music performance and multimedia installations. Geers completed his DMA in Music Composition at Columbia University, where he studied with Brad Garton, Tristan Murail, Fred Lerdahl, and Jonathan D. Kramer.
Website: www.dgeers.com
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/douggeers
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOcOicNms0Uya8Wlj_Fzb-A5P8qLCz3mg
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doug.geers
Douglas Cohen
Douglas Cohen is an intermedia composer and often a collaborator with film, performance, and folk artists. Cohen was an early advocate for digital media on the Internet. He organized the NewMusNet Conference of Arts Wire with Pauline Oliveros, and later he served as Arts Wire Systems coordinator.
Cohen is a specialist in American experimental music, with particular attention to the work of John Cage, Morton Feldman and Pauline Oliveros. He co-created and produced the evening-length intermedia work "imusicircus" at Experimental Intermedia in New York and LACE Gallery in Los Angeles (later with the California EAR Unit at the L.A. County Museum of Art) as "City Circus" events for the John Cage exhibition "Rolywholyover a Circus."
At Brooklyn College, Professor Cohen is the undergraduate Deputy Director of the Conservatory of Music, the Associate Director of the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music, the coordinator of Core Curriculum 1130, and the Director of the Brooklyn College Composers' Forum.
Johanna Devaney
Johanna Devaney's research seeks to understand how humans engage with music, primarily through performance, with a particular focus on the singing voice, and how computers can be used to model and augment our understanding of this engagement. Her work draws on the disciplines of music, psychology, and computer science and has been published in the Journal of New Music Research, Psychomusicology, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies, and Ex Tempore as well as presented at numerous international and national conferences. She is currently the speciality chief editor for the Digital Musicology section of Frontiers in Digital Humanities.
Devaney previously taught in the Music Technology program at NYU Steinhardt and the Music Theory and Cognition program at Ohio State University. She completed her postdoc at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. in music technology at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. She also holds an M.Phil. degree in music theory from Columbia University as well as an MA in composition from York University in Toronto.
Devaney's research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSRHC), the Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture (FRQSC), the Google Faculty Research program, and, most recently, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Digital Humanities program.
David Grubbs
David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. He is the author of The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press) and, with Anthony McCall, Simultaneous Soloists (Pioneer Works Press).
Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 190 releases; his most recent solo recording is Creep Mission (Blue Chopsticks, 2017). In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He is known for his ongoing cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, the Red Krayola, Royal Trux, and many others. He is a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a contributing editor in music for BOMB Magazine, chair of the Blank Forms board of directors, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.
Angela Piva
Angela Piva, music industry ace, highly skilled in all aspects of music/audio production, recording, mixing and mastering with over 30 years of professional audio engineering experience and accolades. Recognized by several Grammy award nominations from NARAS as well as RIAA multi-platinum sales and awards for many projects both past and present. Angela is currently a member of the Audio and Music Production Staff & Faculty at the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, Brooklyn College CUNY located at the Steiner Studios film lot in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Recently elected Chair of the Audio Engineering Society NY Section, interviewed frequently over the years for a variety of articles, books, press and a popular guest speaker at many industry events, Angela is also noted for being one of the few successful women recording engineer/mixers in the business and is featured in the Russell Simmons documentary “The Show”.
Participated as one of the guest speakers that gave testimonials on the first inquiry hearing chaired by Tina Tchen for the Recording Academy Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion in 2018.
Recording and Mix Credits include: Michael Jackson, Toni Braxton, Naughty By Nature, Queen Latifah, Run DMC, Ronnie Spector, Groove Theory, Mary J Blige, Color Me Badd, Heavy D, Christopher Williams, Next, Pat Benatar, Foxy Brown, Shabba Ranks, Ghostface Killah, Zhane, Rita Wilson. Film Music Mixing Credits include: New Jack City, Poetic Justice, Juice, Love Jones, Toy Story, The Show, Sunset Park, Space Jam, NJ Drive, Why Do Fools Fall in Love. Spoken word performers including: Cherry Jones, Stanley Tucci, Lynn Redgrave, Lauren Bacall, Anderson Cooper and many more.
• AES, NARAS and ASCAP member
• AES NY Section Chair / Current
• AES Education Committee
• Sound Thinking Student Diversity and Inclusive Music Program/Consultant (Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment)
• B.M. Berklee School of Music, Music Production & Engineering
• MAT, CUNY, Master of the Arts Music
• Website: https://www.angelapiva.com/
Teo Blake Beauchamp
Teo Blake Beauchamp is a singer-songwriter, producer, engineer, and educator from Los Angeles. His musical lexicon is informed by a myriad of disparate sources, which converge in his work as a form of assemblage. While he works extensively as an engineer and producer, he continues to write and record his own music, believing strongly in the artist Arthur Jafa’s proposal that one "should pursue what is singular about [one’s] preoccupation.” The pursuit of that singularity embodies the nature of Beauchamp’s practice and his art.
As a teen in Los Angeles Beauchamp was immersed in the world of underground hip hop while at the same time exploring experimental jazz artists like Sun Ra and Yusef Lateef as well as electronic music such as the work of Apex Twin and Björk. At Sarah Lawrence College he studied classical, jazz, experimental, and electronic music while beginning to write and record his own work. Beauchamp moved to Austin, TX after college where he performed and collaborated widely. It was also in Austin that he developed a love and appreciation for country and folk music.
Returning to New York to pursue his MFA in Sonic Arts from Brooklyn College, Beauchamp dove into his career as an engineer and producer, running sessions for classical orchestras, jazz and rock groups, singer-songwriters, hip-hop artists, and beyond. It was also at this time that Beauchamp began composing for film and new media as well as creating sound installations for galleries.
But all the while he was writing and producing new music of his own. The first body of work to come out of this period was his 2019 album, misanthropist’s Heaven. It was initially released as a multimedia art installation that premiered at Evening Hours in Manhattan. Having reassessed his creative perspective and goals, misanthropist’s Heaven represented a turning point in Blake’s career to date.
Beauchamp has been teaching as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College since 2019 and has taught a diversity of classes in the Conservatory of Music. Beauchamp also teaches Rap and Rock as Cultural Phenomena at Montclair State University and is a Certified Avid Instructor. The various creative, technical, and pedagogical practices that Beauchamp works in help to inform one another and are very much intertwined.
Jules Gimbrone
Jules Gimbrone creates fragile corporeal sound and sculptural ensembles that highlight the differentiations between modes of perceptual acquisition—specifically visual and sonic—within complex and precarious arrangements of subjects and objects. Building on this is an expansive idea of the phenomenology of resonance–social performativity, identity development, subject/object relationships, etc.–all being inherent to the accumulation of layers that are built on materially transparent, fragile, surfaces.
Resonance, as a set of conditions or relationships between things, becomes activated and legible through light and sound then complicated through abstraction and perceptual manipulations.
Gimbrone’s works have appeared at such venues as Walker Art Center, Stellar Projects, SculptureCenter, ISSUE Project Room, The Rubin Museum, MOMA PS1, REDCAT, Human Resources LA, Park View Gallery, Vox Populi, and Théâtre de l’Usine, Geneva, Switzerland. Gimbrone received an MFA in Music Composition and Integrated Media from CalARTS in 2014. In 2018 Gimbrone received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and was accepted to In Practice at SculptureCenter.
• Website: www.julesgimbrone.com
Amirtha Kidambi
Amirtha Kidambi is the composer and bandleader of her quartet Elder Ones, with Matt Nelson, Max Jaffe and Nick Dunston and the leader of her vocal quartet Lines of Light, featuring Anaïs Maviel, Emilie Lesbros and Jean-Carla Rodea. Kidambi is also a regular collaborator of Lea Bertucci, in a voice and analog electronics duo, is a member of guitarist Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl, featured in various projects with composer and alto saxophonist Darius Jones, a longtime contributor of Charlie Looker’s early music inspired dark folk band Seaven Teares and a soloist in Pat Spadine's analog percussion and light ensemble Ashcan Orchestra. She has collaborated and performed with New York luminaries in the experimental and creative music community including Tyshawn Sorey, Matana Roberts, Ingrid Laubrock, Maria Grand, Brandon Lopez, Daniel Carter, Sam Newsome, Trevor Dunn, Ava Mendoza, Matteo Liberatore and veteran improviser William Parker.
Her debut as a bandleader was met with critical acclaim. As Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times, “the aggressive and sublime first album by the band Elder Ones, Holy Science, is a kind of gauge for how strong and flexible the scene of young musicians in New York’s improvised and experimental music world can be. At the center of it are drones and phonemes. The group’s leader, the composer and singer Amirtha Kidambi, holds forth behind a harmonium, the small keyboard instrument with hand-pumped bellows; it’s commonly used in bhajan, the Indian devotional-singing tradition that was central to her musical experience while growing up in a South Indian family.”
Amirtha earned an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, an M.M. in Voice and Musicology at CUNY Brooklyn College and a B.A. in Voice from Loyola Marymount University. She currently serves on the faculty for Brooklyn College and the New School.
• Website: https://www.amirthakidambi.com/
Claire Marie Lim
Claire Marie Lim is a Singapore-born music technologist and educator, also active under her artist project dolltr!ck. She specializes in instruction for live electronic performance, production and programming, and is an advocate of womxn and Asian representation in music technology.
Classically-trained as a pianist, flautist and composer, Claire slipped headfirst into the abyss of electronic music in college. She emerged from its depths as a DJ, remixer and live performance designer for numerous award-winning artists, including two-time Grammy nominees Alphabet Rockers, acclaimed keyboardist Rachel Z, My Brightest Diamond and Nona Hendryx of Labelle.
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As dolltr!ck, Claire presents dynamic live sets of originals and remixes that meld electronica, pop and dance music. Her performance content has been featured by Genelec, iZotope, Serato and Aodyo Instruments. She was involved in the launch of Berklee College of Music's groundbreaking Electronic Digital Instrument program, and has played at events by TEDx, Toyota, iHeartRadio, PayPal and KCON.
In music education and arts activism, Claire collaborates with the Girls Rock Campaign, Beats By Girlz, and the Queens Public Library network, and has received support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and Queens Council on the Arts. She develops curriculum for various ages and experience levels, having consulted for the International Center of Photography, Queens College, Coursera and the Berklee network.
Students can learn with Claire through in-person private lessons, small group workshops and large-scale clinics. Remotely, she teaches via video conferencing and offers a selection of online courses as listed on www.clairemarielim.com/learning. Claire also runs the doll troop, a mentorship experience where K-12 girls can shadow her in electronic songwriting sessions and live shows, with signups on a rolling basis at www.dolltrick.com/dolltroop.
• Website: https://www.clairemarielim.com/
Daniel Martin McCormick
Daniel Martin-McCormick is an electronic musician, composer and event organizer with 25 years experience on the stage. For 14 years, his primary focus has been on live electronic hardware performance in both techno and avant garde/concert formats. He has performed in over 30 countries and at many esteemed institutions and festivals, including Berghain, Unsound, CTM Festival, Sónar, fabric and more. His roots are in the Washington DC punk scene, which he began to participate in as a teenager in the late '90s. His bands Black Eyes and Mi Ami toured extensively between 2001-2012 and released albums on Dischord Records, Touch & Go and Thrill Jockey.
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Daniel began releasing solo electronic works as Ital in 2011, and then as Relaxer in 2016. Both projects have released albums and EPs on Planet Mu, as well as Workshop, 100% Silk, Avenue 66, Club Night Club and his own Lovers Rock Recordings. Martin-McCormick was one of the founding organizers of the Sustain-Release festival and worked as co-director from 2017-2021. Today, he is the co-founder of Dripping, a two night camping festival and event series that focuses on the intersection between experimental and dance-oriented electronic forms.
Here is a SoundCloud playlist with live sets by Daniel.
Phil Moffa
Phil Moffa is an audio engineer, electronic musician, and multidisciplinary artist from New York City. As the owner/operator of Butcha Sound Studios in NYC, Moffa has mixing, mastering, and recording credits on over 200 releases. Artists include DVS1, The Martinez Brothers, Photay, Kool Keith, AG, A-Trak, Nile Rodgers and Chic, and many more on labels including Warp Records, !K7, Defected, Fool's Gold, and Red Apples 45. Moffa mastered the 2023 Latin Grammy Award-winning album Em Nome Da Estrela by Brazilian artist Xênia França.
Moffa has released several albums, EPs, singles, and remixes both solo and in collaboration. He has performed domestically and internationally as an electronic musician and DJ since 1997. In 2020, Phil started Butcha Sound Records to release original works of both his music and art. In 2023, he collaborated with Grammy Award-winning composer and conductor Joel Thome to create the album Event Horizon.
Moffa's Lost Souls Of Saturn multimedia project with Seth Troxler creates in the forms of music, art installation, video, books, and augmented reality. LSOS have performed in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Fondation Beyeler in Basel and Zurich, Switzerland, and at the Saatchi Gallery in London, UK. Site-specific performances include collaborations with contemporary installation artists Olafur Eliasson and Ernesto Neto. They have officially remixed Louie Vega and Elements of Life, UNKLE, Luciano, Kate Simko & The London Electronic Orchestra, Mathew Jonson, !!! (Chk, Chk Chk), Mashrou Leila, and Tiga. Their works have been remixed by Wolfgang Tillmans, James Holden, Pepe Bradock, Carl Craig, and Mathew Jonson. The LSOS & Tokimonsta song “Revision of the Past” appeared in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto Online.
In 2022, Moffa became an Experience Producer for Aimi, Inc., helping develop their innovative platform. Aimi uses AI to recontextualize musical ideas to create unique listening experiences and is a leader in the generative music space. Aimi has appeared in Forbes, engadget, and the Wall Street Journal.
Moffa is an Assistant Adjunct Professor at Brooklyn College and a Lecturer in Music at SUNY Purchase College. He has taught for Sonic Arts since 2021 and has been part of the Studio Production/Music Technology faculty at Purchase since 2003. Moffa has an M.M. (2010) and B.F.A. (2002) in Studio Composition from the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College.
Website: https://philmoffa.com
Marina Rosenfeld
Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and sound artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Since the early 1990s, when she created the first 17-woman sheer frost orchestra, her works have foregrounded participation, sociality, transdisciplinarity and a feminist approach to noise, vocality and acoustic architectures. She has created monumental sound works in such spaces as the Park Avenue Armory, the Museum of Modern Art, the Serralves Foundation and Western Australia’s Midlands Railway Workshops; participated in surveys including the Whitney Biennial (2002 and 2008), Montreal Biennial (2016), Liverpool Biennial (2011) and PERFORMA Biennial (2009 and 2011), and documenta14’s radio program (2017); and composed works for festivals including the Holland, Borealis, Wien Modern, Ultima and Donaueschingen Musiktage, among many others. Recent solo exhibitions include Portikus Frankfurt, CCS Bard/Hessel Museum, the Artist’s Institute and, upcoming in 2021, Kunsthaus Baselland in Basel, Switzerland.
As a turntablist, working with a unique palette of original dub plates, Rosenfeld has also been active as a collaborator and improviser, performing and recording with such figures as George Lewis, Christian Marclay, Annette Henry aka Warrior Queen and Okkyung Lee, among many others. Her music for dance includes live performance with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and works for choreographers Ralph Lemon and Maria Hassabi. Rosenfeld is also currently a research artist with Experiments in Art and Technology at Bell Labs/Nokia in New Jersey.
• Website: www.marinarosenfeld.com.
Ben Vida
Ben Vida is a composer, improviser and artist. In the mid-1990s he co-founded the minimalist quartet Town & Country and released solo records under the moniker Bird Show. He has worked with numerous labels including PAN, Shelter Press and Kranky. Vida’s composition practice focuses on the use of electronics and voice and has recently expanded to works for small ensembles. The text based pieces he produces utilize generative writing techniques developed through an engagement with experimental writing practices. In these works language is treated as a raw material that can be sampled and re-contextualized into numerous mutable forms. In addition to his compositions for voice Vida has produced numerous releases that demonstrate his research into systems and sound syntheses.
Vida’s work has been featured in Artforum, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Art Review, Wire Magazine, The Creators Project, WIRED Magazine among others.
Recent projects include a collaboration with YarnWire and vocalist Nina Dante premiered through Lampo at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and the release of a new LP by his duo with Marina Rosenfeld.
Red Wierenga
Red Wierenga is a pianist, accordionist, respectronicist, improviser, and composer based in New York City. His longest creative association is with the Respect Sextet, called "a group which has released one of the most compelling recordings of the year" by the Wall Street Journal and "one of the best and most ambitious new ensembles in jazz" by Signal to Noise.
He has performed and/or recorded with artists including The Claudia Quintet, Ensemble Signal, Salo, the Fireworks Ensemble, and David Crowell.
Wierenga builds and performs with new interfaces for electroacoustic improvisation, working with analog and digital synthesizers.He received his bachelor's degree from the Eastman School of Music, studying with Harold Danko, Ralph Alessi, and Kevin Puts. After having studied at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, the Netherlands, with Joel Ryan and Paul Berg, he became an Enhanced Chancellor's Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he received his Ph.D. and his teachers included Jason Eckardt and Douglas Geers. He has taught music appreciation and electronic music at Baruch College (CUNY) and currently teaches at the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music.
• Website: https://www.redwierenga.com/
Morton Subotnick
(faculty emeritus; retired 2022.)
Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. The work that brought Subotnick celebrity was Silver Apples of the Moon [1966–67], commissioned by Nonesuch Records, marking the first time an original large-scale composition had been created specifically for the disc medium — a conscious acknowledgment that the home stereo system constituted a present-day form of chamber music. It has become a modern classic and was recently entered into the National Register of Recorded Works at the Library of Congress. Only 300 recordings throughout the entire history of recorded music have been chosen.
In the early 1960s, Subotnick taught at Mills College, and, with Ramon Sender, he co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center. During this period he collaborated with Anna Halprin in two works (the 3 legged stool and Parades and Changes) and was music director of the Actors Workshop. It was also during this period that Subotnick worked with Don Buchla on what may have been the first analog synthesizer (now at the Library of Congress).
In 1966 Subotnick was instrumental in getting a Rockefeller Grant to join the Tape Center with the Mills Chamber Players (at Mills College with performers Nate Rubin, violin; Bonnie Hampton, cello; Naomi Sparrow, piano and Subotnick, clarinet). The grant required that the Tape Center relocate to a host institution that became Mills College. Subotnick, however, did not stay with the move, but went to New York with the Actors Workshop to become the first music director of the Lincoln Center Rep Company in the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. He became an artist in residence at the newly formed Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. The School of the Arts provided him with a studio and a Buchla Synthesizer. During this period he helped develop and became artistic director of the Electric Circus and the Electric Ear. This was also the time of the creation of Silver Apples of the Moon, The Wild Bull and Touch.
In 1969 Subotnick was invited to be part of a team of artists to move to Los Angeles to plan a new school of the arts. With Mel Powell as dean and a team of four other pairs of artists, Subotnick, as associate dean, carved out a new path of music education and created the now famous California Institute of the Arts. Subotnick remained associate dean of the music school for four years and then, resigning as associate dean, became the head of the composition program where, a few years later, he created a new media program that introduced interactive technology and multimedia into the curriculum.
Subotnick is now pioneering works to offer musical creative tools to young children. He is the author of a series of CD-ROMs for children and a children's website and is developing a program for classroom and after-school programs that will soon become available internationally.
Among Subotnick's awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Rockefeller Grants, two Meet the Composers, American Academy of Arts and Letters Composer Award, Brandies Award, Deutcher Akademisher Austauschdienst Kunsterprogramm (DAAD), Composer in Residence in Berlin, Lifetime Achievement Award (SEAMUS at Dartmouth), ASCAP: John Cage Award, ACO: Lifetime Achievement, and Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts.
Morton Subotnick tours extensively throughout the United States and Europe as a lecturer and composer/performer.
• Website: www.mortonsubotnick.com