Teaching and Research Statement

I am a composer/sound artist with an international career, creating works through the use of digital technology, most often in combination with acoustic instruments. I situate these works in relation to the common-practice canon by "interpreting" or responding to existing works. Much like a performer, I seek meaning in the relationship between my subjective reading of a work and the work itself, comprised not only of a musical score but of the history of its successive iterations in performances and recordings; I engage through compositional processes with these various elements. This statement is principally artistic, highlighting my most significant recent compositions. I will also provide highlights from my teaching experiences at Stanford, and a summary of design and research projects.

Ada's Song (2019) exemplifies several aspects of my practice: computer-assisted compositional techniques, instrument/interface building, notions of expressivity and interpretation in real-time interaction, and feminist perspectives on composition and music computing. Commissioned as a tribute to Ada Lovelace, this work employs the Piano Machine, first premièred in Tracer la lune d'un doigt (2017). Co-designed and co-built with my former Goldsmiths colleague Konstantin Leonenko for Explore Ensemble in 2017, the Piano Machine mechanically excites the strings of the piano with individual motors for each note, such that the amplitude of each note can be varied over time. This commission offered the opportunity to build a new, portable version with improved expressivity, capable of performing expressively in response to the other instruments through real-time Machine Learning (ML) processes. By allowing the Piano Machine to "learn" from the musicians’ interpretation of the score – produced entirely through AI processes – over the course of the performance, ML processes are rendered visible and tangible. The soprano incarnating Ada Lovelace through her AI-concatenated texts also has sections of their part created by ML processes influenced by the ensemble: sonic cues for new material are generated in real time and communicated to them through an earbud.

The portrait CD Riot Ensemble recorded for Huddersfield Contemporary Records from 2018-2022 (with delays due to the pandemic) also centers vocality and expressive electronics: voices are articulated through the live electronics by a different technique in each work, such that they become inextricable from the instrumental textures; thus, musical materials become intertwined and bound together with textual meanings and vocal expression. For instance, in the quartet De Profundis Clamavi (hommage à Alban Berg) (2007), the eponymous poem by Baudelaire comprising the "secret program" of Berg's Lyrische Suite is made audible through the electronics. While De Profundis and Funeral Sentences (2008) obtain this blending of text and music by using frequencies derived from close-micing of the instrumental parts to create real-time filters through which recordings of the vocal lines are then processed, the more recent Nachtgewächse (2014), Leçons de ténèbres (2016) and Song of Alma (2018) go a step further in integrating the processed vocal materials into the acoustic space of the instruments by transmitting them through the instruments themselves via tactile transducers. The portrait CD to be released in Winter 2023 by Another Timbre includes both chamber works with live electronics and purely acoustic ones produced by computer-assisted processes, such as Forklaret Nat (2012) and Im Blutstrahl des Mondes (2018). As in Ada's Song, an electronic interface produces acoustic sound in Im Blutstrahl: the Harp Fingers, an offshoot project from the Piano Machine.

I composed three works for chamber orchestra during my first four years at Stanford (2018-2021): the aforementioned Song of Alma, Mondesflecten (2021) and Abhanden (2021). Like Ada's Song, Song of Alma was commissioned as a form of reflection on a historical female figure: Alma Mahler. Composed in the wake of the resurgence in 2017-18 of Tarana Burke's #metoo movement, it expresses a sense of lost opportunity and time, taking Alma Mahler's forced renunciation of her compositional career as a point of departure. This is a theme I had explored previously on the stage in Parlour Sounds (2016).

The pandemic has loomed large over my time at Stanford, and not only in terms of isolation and cancellations: I contracted COVID in early March 2020, was eventually hospitalized, and have been in treatment for Long COVID since. My experience of the pandemic shaped three works from this period: A Complete History of Music (2020), Il y a plus d'eau que prévu sur la lune (2020), and Hear (2021-22). In April 2020, I quickly composed a lockdown-compatible addendum to A Complete History, Appendix 2, which – unlike the other very difficult movements – could be recorded at home separately by each member of the JACK quartet for me to then mix and add the live electronics part at home. That radiophonic project, recorded and mixed in a single feverish day, peaked my interest in the medium, as well as in the potential of JackTrip for online performance, which I had been using since creating the interactive network performance Adagio pour l'absence with media artist Rob King in 2010. Il y a plus d'eau was commissioned by and recorded at Radio France by Keiko Murakami, once again during lockdown. In the studio, I used overdubbing techniques to synchronize two separate recordings of Keiko performing on contrabass flute while vocalizing, with electronics processing creating further ambiguity in the perception of the separate parts and between the voice and the flute itself. In Hear, commissioned by the Robb Trust for the vocal ensemble Ekmeles joined by William Lang on trombone, the conditions of the pandemic are played out onstage through the live electronics set-up: the six vocalists wear masks (custom-made for singing and playing wind instruments) equipped with miniature microphones, and are connected to one another through talkboxes, such that the amplified signal from three of the singers' microphones are transmitted through a tube into the mouths of the other three singers, and amplified in turn by their own miniature microphones. While the tubes and masks evoked a hospital environment, they also created intimate relationships between the performers, allowing them to effectively sing into one another's mouths through the electronic medium.

Turning to my teaching, I have contributed to four main areas: 1) recruitment for the DMA in Composition, Masters in Music, Science and Technology (MST), Computer- Based Music, Technology and Acoustics (CBMTA) PhD, and undergraduate programs in Music, in particular by expanding outreach to underrepresented groups in these programs; 2) updating curricula and creating new programs to adapt to changes in student interests and demographics and a desire for greater interdisciplinarity; 3) leveraging my international profile as an artist to connect both colleagues and students to key figures and institutions – such as IRCAM and EMPAC – and drawing on this experience to bring in new perspectives; and 4) employing experimental classroom techniques, such as flipping the classroom, giving students the opportunity to moderate discussions or lead exercises.

Recruitment has relied on two methods: welcoming prospective students to campus – whether through visits or, in the case of high school students, internships, mentoring and course auditing – and visiting universities across the US and internationally, to not only present my work but to teach one or more master classes or workshops (virtually or in- person), in particular targeting Masters programs. Both means have yielded concrete results, directly resulting in admissions not only from prestigious masters programs in the US such as Dartmouth and Columbia, but from the Global South. I also worked with my colleagues to create the Composition Diploma, which allows PhD students in other disciplines to pursue a program of compositional activities. I am proud to say that my advisees exemplify values of both interdisciplinarity and inclusion: two were awarded Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowships, and they have also received RAISE, DARE and JEDI awards, as well as participating in Stanford Impact Labs.

The pandemic conditions necessitated further innovation and adaptation in teaching, often mediated by technology. In Spring 2020, I used the savings of travel costs for in- person events for the Composition Forum – which I was responsible for that year – to create a series of weekly online events featuring performers of contemporary music from

around the world, ranging from Western orchestral to traditional instruments. This series brought perspectives from outside of academia to our composition curricula, and also provided income for freelance musicians in those first difficult months of the pandemic. More than 100 people signed up to attend the public-facing series online. In a new course I co-taught in Spring 2020 with doctoral students Julie Herndon and Charlie Sdraulig, Music 223D: Sound Practice: Embodiment and the Social, we focused on online embodiment by having the students explore their home environments for materials to include in sound and video works, and collectively performed works for networked media. In 2020-21, I created Music 285: Intermedia Lab, co-taught with Constantin Basica. Originally planned as a course centered on making in specialized CCRMA spaces, we adapted the course to focus on empowering students to be able to work at home by participating in the Personal 3D (P3D) printer program, holding workshops on how to use JackTrip for audiovisual streaming, and exploring playful uses of the network, such as live video processing in online avatar-dress-up "dance parties". In Winter 2021, I hosted Pamela Z as a Denning Virtual Visiting Artist for a residency involving lecturing, critique sessions, panel discussions, and an online collaborative performance with students.

The signature course I introduced into the CCRMA curriculum, Music250C, invokes the three principal areas of my practice: Interaction-Intermedia-Immersion. This third area is reflected in my start-up project: building an immersive audiovisual system at CCRMA of a quality and scale unparalleled in North America. Despite pandemic-related delays, we have implemented CCRMA’s first high-definition Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) system. Since 2018, I have had several residencies at EMPAC centered on WFS implementation. I have created several compositions for this medium and adapted existing works to it: these include Luigi Nono’s evening-length la lontananza nostalgica utopica futura, which violinist Marco Fusi and I will perform for the first time with WFS in the 2023 Timespans Festival.

In addition to three upcoming CD releases – the third featuring my collaborative feedback improvisations with Tiptoe Company, Marco Fusi, Katie Porter and other artists – I am currently working on a cyberfeminist futurist opera with a libretto by Alexandra Kleeman, thanks to support from the Stanford Humanities Center (2021-22) and the Guggenheim Foundation (2023-24). The opera will feature two women communicating across outer space, exploring their interactions with their technologically-mediated environments through sound-making robotic devices I will design for the project. In particular, I am interested in the flexible, organic qualities of soft robotics, which I briefly explored in 2016 in a collaborative sex toy hackathon project, the LovePad.

Technological mediation – including networked communication – and inclusive design are two key areas of my research. My first significant engagement with the latter subject was in the Mondegewächse project (2014), which was the fruit of a yearlong residency with ShareMusic & Performing Arts, a Swedish knowledge center for artistic development and inclusion. I have been a member of the International Advisory Board of ShareMusic since 2019, and in 2020, we received the New Interfaces for Musical Expression Accessibility Award for our collective work. I will explore both of these areas – networked mediation and inclusion – as PI for the Changing Human Experience project, Considering Disability in Online Cultural Experiences (2022-24), and as PI for the Stanford team of the 2022-25 Horizon EU project Multisensory, User-centred, Shared cultural Experiences through Interactive Technologies (MuseIT). These projects will galvanize interest in Disability Design among graduate students in Music, and call upon CCRMA’s diverse research areas: network performance, virtual acoustics, neuroscience, AI, etc. Members of our team of graduate students will be funded to travel to Europe for residencies with project partners such as ShareMusic and the Institute For Research & Co-ordination in Acoustics & Music (IRCAM), the latter in connection with a European Research Council Advanced Grant project on creative AI, Raising Co-creativity in Cyber-Human Musicianship (REACH).