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brief bio

I am a composer, installation artist, software programmer, and occasional music hardware tinkerer. I grew up in southeast PA, outside of Philadelphia, and I now live and work in Denver. My art, music, and research has been featured at SEAMUS National Conference, Electronic Music Midwest Festival, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, ICMC, SCI National Conference, Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium, Communikey Festival, Chosen Vale International Trumpet Seminar, the Boston CyberArts Festival, and the Dartmouth Festival of New Musics, among other spots. Before moving to Denver, I completed a two-year visiting professorship in Digital Arts at Stetson University (2012-2014). I earned my Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of Florida (2013), M.A. in Electro-Acoustic Music from Dartmouth College (2007), and B.A. in Music, Psychology, and Astronomy (minor) from the University of Virginia (2005). My strong background and commitment to transdisciplinary art and humanities research continues to fuel my understanding of Experimental Music as a unifiying field of study. My ultimate aim is to compose some emancipated form of music for space colonies to help asuage existential angst. As Larry Polansky wrote in 1987, the first process "essential to and unavoidable in the future of our music and to our future as human beings [is] leaving the planet: becoming fully communicative inhabitants of the galaxy."* I too heed the long view. And I understand my current research and creative practice to be a step in that direction; I focus on news ways to think about music's ability to disclose, or even produce, truths. I consider this work to be philosophically 'speculative' insofar as it proceeds from the simple observation that aural experience takes place and is, therefore, limited both perceptually and epistemologically. The art I make is thus not an attempt to universalize any particular understanding of its content (interpretation), but rather, simply attempts to change the appearance of what is.

Here along the Front Range of Colorado, I also engage the local art and tech communities in a number of other ways. I work as Lead Music Mentor at madelife (a Creative Accelerator), as co-founder of two startup companies (RackFX and CauseART), and as a freelance music hardware and software developer on a number of other projects.

Throughout my career, I have had the opportunity to study composition and computer music with Jon Appleton, Newton Armstrong, Matthew Burtner, Charles Dodge, Paul Koonce, Larry Polansky, Paul Richards, Marina Rosenfeld, James Paul Sain, Judith Shatin, and Ge Wang. I am indebted to each, for each has shaped my thinking and technical knowledge in ways both big and small.

* Larry Polansky, "The Future of Music," Leonardo Music Journal 20, no. 4 (1987): 363.

research interests

• Situated (sonic) art practices informed by speculative materialist philosophy.
• Algorithmic composition, distribution models, selection algorithms, and convergent functions.
• HCI using position sensing technologies with non-intuitive data mapping strategies for sound generation.
• Music as both reflective and constitutive of social interaction.