Massimiliano Cerioni
he/him
Berlin, Germany
Massimiliano Cerioni (1986 Italy) is an award-winning composer based in Berlin, MMus in electronic music from the Alfredo Casella Conservatory of Music (L'Aquila, IT), sound engineer, sound artist, and educator. He is proficient in composition, sound design, digital signal processing for audio and music applications, generative algorithms, creative coding, sound art and Audiovisual installations, augmented instrument design, and performance. He teaches these topics in person and online via Zoom.
From Pomezia (Rome, IT), Massimiliano graduated with an MM in Electronic Music from A. Casella Conservatory of Music in L’Aquila (Italy) under the direction of Michelangelo Lupone and Agostino Di Scipio. He has been an intern for Institutions like Centro Ricerche Musicali of Rome, INA-GRM of Paris, and GMEM of Marseille. He attended workshops with Gavin Bryars, Alvise Vidolin, Khyam Allami, and Giorgio Sancristoforo.
As an educator, Cerioni has worked for several educational institutions in Italy and abroad and teaches sound design at the Mediadesign Hochschule in Berlin. He also conducts his teaching activity in one-to-one sessions in person and via Zoom, teaching audio signal processing, electroacoustic music composition, sound design, DSP for music application in Gen, and generative algorithms. As an audio engineer, he worked for companies like Agorà SRL, which made him assist in relevant projects such as the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. He accepts commissions for developing custom audio software and M4L device development projects, including works for the producer Albert Van Abbe and the audio hardware company Enjoy Lab.
As an artist, he participated in events like the Artescienza Festival in Rome, ICMC 2014 in Athens, Psychedelic Film and Music Festival in NYC, Live Performers Meeting, Venice Biennale Theatre College, Chilean Conexión in Berlin, Radius Collective Exhibition in Boston, CTM Festival in Berlin; his works have been featured in venues like National Academy of Dance (Rome IT), Contemporary Cluster (Rome, IT), Goethe Institut Rom (Rome, IT), Tempo Reale (Florence, IT), Teatro Vespasiano (Rieti, IT), Auditorium del Parco and Auditorium Shigeru Ban (L’Aquila, IT), Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, GR), TEUC (Coimbra, PT), Kuopion Musiikkikeskus (Kuopio, FI), HAU2 (Berlin, DE), Kunsttage (Basel, CH).
Cerioni has received awards, commissioned works (Cycling74 and Artescienza Festival – twice), and distinctions, including placing 1st at the Italian national art prize Premio Abbado in 2015 under the Electroacoustic Music Compositions category. In 2017, Cerioni presented his first augmented monochord prototype called Metastring at Tempo Reale Festival in Florence. Coming from a long tradition of experimental luthiery in Rome that goes from the Eolian Harps of Mario Bertoncini to the Feed-Drum of Michelangelo Lupone, and built with the help of the luthier and engineer Maurizio Palpacelli, this instrument embeds an acoustic feedback chain system that gives infinite sustain to the string. He keeps expanding the research work, currently focusing on the 4th prototype. In 2019, he was in Stockholm (Sweden) as a resident artist at EMS — Elektron Musik Studion and a guest of the CM Lerici Italian Institute of Culture. In 2020, he announced his audio plugin project Culto, made for releasing Max For Live devices for experimental sound design. From 2023, Culto plugins are distributed by Isotonik Studios. Since 2021, he has been a resident artist from SCOPE BLN in Berlin, where he premiered his video installation Inner Landscape inspired by Filipa Tojal’s paintings, his solo show Rebirthing — featuring an audiovisual performance and prints of digital artworks, and the collaborative Performance-Installation Obscuritas (2023), together with Silvia Morandi. Also at SCOPE BLN, Cerioni co-founded the collective Wasch, an intermedia art collective active in Berlin. In 2022, Cycling74 commissioned him to create a MaxMSP Gen patch, for which he implemented a modified version of the Lotka-Volterra two-species competition-cooperation model as a sound synthesis system. In 2023, the same project was featured in the Radius Collective Exhibition Underline at the Midway Studios gallery In Boston and the Linea Festival in Biella, Italy; later on, it became a kinetic sound installation designed with the artist Fabrizio Di Salvo and presented at Kunsttage 2023 (Basel CH) and Scope BLN (Berlin, DE).
He is part of the artist collectives Wasch (Berlin) and Radius (US). Also, he collaborates with the online learning center Music Hackspace and several artists and professionals from different fields. Notable mentions: Molly Haig, Julian Zyklus, Pixie Fairy Lawn, Silvia Morandi, Function Store, Fabrizio Di Salvo, SaraBrown, Opale Studio, reinfected me.
Cerioni’s music-making focuses on primordial sound topoi that interconnect in a multi-layered acoustic texture, creating an immersive, reflective, and engaging listening experience. His artistic universe can be abstract yet full of symbolism related to physical perception, natural phenomena, liminal spaces, and psychological states. His aesthetics are influenced by spectralism, musique concrète and bruitism, minimalism, drone, doom metal, deep listening, stochastic music, new objectivity, IDM, and psychedelic music genres.
Since 2023, his music has been released under the Elli Records label.
“I am interested in the liminal spaces of perception and between different languages. The listening experience in this sense and its implications have a privileged perspective compared to the sole artwork. Thus, I try to expand the connection between my creation and the audience by guiding them through a novel experience, which before asking them attention to a sound, creates the conditions to do so.
Among my current/frequent investigations, there is the usage of audio coding to highlight hidden phenomena of complex systems (the work Two Species is representative in this sense), and the use of alternative luthiery and digital signal processing to similarly reveal the inner features of sound (my augmented instruments do this by enhancing the spectral components of metal strings through feedback).”
From Pomezia (Rome, IT), Massimiliano graduated with an MM in Electronic Music from A. Casella Conservatory of Music in L’Aquila (Italy) under the direction of Michelangelo Lupone and Agostino Di Scipio. He has been an intern for Institutions like Centro Ricerche Musicali of Rome, INA-GRM of Paris, and GMEM of Marseille. He attended workshops with Gavin Bryars, Alvise Vidolin, Khyam Allami, and Giorgio Sancristoforo.
As an educator, Cerioni has worked for several educational institutions in Italy and abroad and teaches sound design at the Mediadesign Hochschule in Berlin. He also conducts his teaching activity in one-to-one sessions in person and via Zoom, teaching audio signal processing, electroacoustic music composition, sound design, DSP for music application in Gen, and generative algorithms. As an audio engineer, he worked for companies like Agorà SRL, which made him assist in relevant projects such as the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. He accepts commissions for developing custom audio software and M4L device development projects, including works for the producer Albert Van Abbe and the audio hardware company Enjoy Lab.
As an artist, he participated in events like the Artescienza Festival in Rome, ICMC 2014 in Athens, Psychedelic Film and Music Festival in NYC, Live Performers Meeting, Venice Biennale Theatre College, Chilean Conexión in Berlin, Radius Collective Exhibition in Boston, CTM Festival in Berlin; his works have been featured in venues like National Academy of Dance (Rome IT), Contemporary Cluster (Rome, IT), Goethe Institut Rom (Rome, IT), Tempo Reale (Florence, IT), Teatro Vespasiano (Rieti, IT), Auditorium del Parco and Auditorium Shigeru Ban (L’Aquila, IT), Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, GR), TEUC (Coimbra, PT), Kuopion Musiikkikeskus (Kuopio, FI), HAU2 (Berlin, DE), Kunsttage (Basel, CH).
Cerioni has received awards, commissioned works (Cycling74 and Artescienza Festival – twice), and distinctions, including placing 1st at the Italian national art prize Premio Abbado in 2015 under the Electroacoustic Music Compositions category. In 2017, Cerioni presented his first augmented monochord prototype called Metastring at Tempo Reale Festival in Florence. Coming from a long tradition of experimental luthiery in Rome that goes from the Eolian Harps of Mario Bertoncini to the Feed-Drum of Michelangelo Lupone, and built with the help of the luthier and engineer Maurizio Palpacelli, this instrument embeds an acoustic feedback chain system that gives infinite sustain to the string. He keeps expanding the research work, currently focusing on the 4th prototype. In 2019, he was in Stockholm (Sweden) as a resident artist at EMS — Elektron Musik Studion and a guest of the CM Lerici Italian Institute of Culture. In 2020, he announced his audio plugin project Culto, made for releasing Max For Live devices for experimental sound design. From 2023, Culto plugins are distributed by Isotonik Studios. Since 2021, he has been a resident artist from SCOPE BLN in Berlin, where he premiered his video installation Inner Landscape inspired by Filipa Tojal’s paintings, his solo show Rebirthing — featuring an audiovisual performance and prints of digital artworks, and the collaborative Performance-Installation Obscuritas (2023), together with Silvia Morandi. Also at SCOPE BLN, Cerioni co-founded the collective Wasch, an intermedia art collective active in Berlin. In 2022, Cycling74 commissioned him to create a MaxMSP Gen patch, for which he implemented a modified version of the Lotka-Volterra two-species competition-cooperation model as a sound synthesis system. In 2023, the same project was featured in the Radius Collective Exhibition Underline at the Midway Studios gallery In Boston and the Linea Festival in Biella, Italy; later on, it became a kinetic sound installation designed with the artist Fabrizio Di Salvo and presented at Kunsttage 2023 (Basel CH) and Scope BLN (Berlin, DE).
He is part of the artist collectives Wasch (Berlin) and Radius (US). Also, he collaborates with the online learning center Music Hackspace and several artists and professionals from different fields. Notable mentions: Molly Haig, Julian Zyklus, Pixie Fairy Lawn, Silvia Morandi, Function Store, Fabrizio Di Salvo, SaraBrown, Opale Studio, reinfected me.
Cerioni’s music-making focuses on primordial sound topoi that interconnect in a multi-layered acoustic texture, creating an immersive, reflective, and engaging listening experience. His artistic universe can be abstract yet full of symbolism related to physical perception, natural phenomena, liminal spaces, and psychological states. His aesthetics are influenced by spectralism, musique concrète and bruitism, minimalism, drone, doom metal, deep listening, stochastic music, new objectivity, IDM, and psychedelic music genres.
Since 2023, his music has been released under the Elli Records label.
“I am interested in the liminal spaces of perception and between different languages. The listening experience in this sense and its implications have a privileged perspective compared to the sole artwork. Thus, I try to expand the connection between my creation and the audience by guiding them through a novel experience, which before asking them attention to a sound, creates the conditions to do so.
Among my current/frequent investigations, there is the usage of audio coding to highlight hidden phenomena of complex systems (the work Two Species is representative in this sense), and the use of alternative luthiery and digital signal processing to similarly reveal the inner features of sound (my augmented instruments do this by enhancing the spectral components of metal strings through feedback).”