Guests and Presenters

Benjamin Wynn earned a Bachelor’s degree in Music from the California Institute of the Arts, and has released five albums under the name “Deru”. In addition Wynn has written for ballet and earned Emmy Awards for his television and film scores.

In addition to his scoring work, Wynn is a founding member and Creative Director of The Echo Society, a Los Angeles based composer collective and non-profit organization that premiers new orchestral works in singular, one-night-only events.

Chris Peck is a composer and software developer. In addition to his work with the Ableton Learning Team, he composes experimental music for dance and theater, including ongoing collaborations with choreographers including Eleanor Bauer and Milka Djordjevich.

He holds an MA from the Dartmouth Electroacoustic Music program and a Ph.D. in Composition and Computer Technologies from the University of Virginia. He has taught courses and workshops in electronic music, songwriting, and inter-arts collaboration in many contexts, including most recently as a lecturer at the University of California, Merced (2015-2017).

David Commander has written, directed and performed his particular style of modern toy theater that has been presented in New York City, Minneapolis (Toy Theater After Dark Festival), Portland (TBA Festival), Chicago (Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival), and Philadelphia. He is also a long time member and collaborator with New York experimental performance ensemble 'Big Art Group'.

Dennis DeSantis is a composer, educator, sound designer, author, and percussionist. In addition to his work on Ableton’s learning team, he teaches a number of courses for Berklee Online.

He received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music and also holds music degrees from Yale and Western Michigan University.

His electronic music appears on labels such as Ghostly, Global Underground, Cocoon, and Kanzleramt, and he has performed throughout North America, Europe, and Japan.

Hidde de Jong is a software developer specialized in building tools for musically synchronized performances and massive mobile experiences.

Together with Mattijs Kneppers he founded Showsync, creating software that extends Ableton Live with video and lighting capabilities. Besides his development work at Showsync, he is the developer of the Smartphone Orchestra and teaches Ableton Live and Max for Live at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.

Jack is a software developer at Ableton. He has worked on Ableton Live, and most recently, Ableton's microsite for learning music fundamentals. His personal work explores the use of interactive media to explain difficult concepts like Fourier analysis, handwriting recognition, and music theory. He holds a master's degree in Digital Music Processing from the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London.

Judy Dunaway is primarily known for her numerous works for latex balloons as sound producers, including sculptural sonic performances, sound installations, interactive pieces and acousmatic works.

Her work has been presented internationally at Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Audio Art Festival Krakow, Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, Cafe Oto, Guelph Jazz Festival (Canada), Podewil (Berlin), Roy and Edna Disney Center, Roulette and STEIM, among others. Her awards/grants/residencies include Elektronmusikstudion Stockholm, New York State Music Fund, the Aaron Copland Fund Recording Grant, the American Composers Forum's Composers Commissioning Fund, Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie and Harvestworks.

She has a Ph.D. in music composition from Stony Brook University and an M.A. from Wesleyan University (where she studied with Alvin Lucier). She has been teaching sound courses at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston since 2005.

Dr. Kate Sicchio works at the interface of technology and performance. Her work has been shown internationally in galleries, on stage and in more unconventional sites, in the form of installations and performances. Most recently she has been working with live coding, machine learning and wearable technology as an intervention in the choreographic process.

She is currently Assistant Professor in Dance and Media Technologies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Keith Fullerton Whitman is a composer & performer currently based in Brooklyn. He is in the process of realizing geographically & thematically relevant Live Electronic Music under the "Redactions" banner, as well as performing contemporary revisions of his classic "Generators" and "Playthroughs" frameworks.

Recently he has performed at the GRM's Immersion festival in Paris, Documenta 14 in Athens, The Labyrinth in Niigata, MaerzMusik's The Long Now in Berlin, Semibreve in Braga, Send + Receive in Winnipeg, The Geometry of Now in Moscow, and at the Don Buchla Memorial Concerts in San Francisco.

(Photo by Lindsay Metivier)

A New York City native, Matthew Ostrowski has worked as a composer, performer and installation artist, exploring work with music, multimedia, video and theater. Using digital tools and formalist techniques to engage with quotidian materials -- sonic, physical, and cultural – Ostrowski's work explores the liminal space between the virtual and phenomenological worlds.

His work, which has been seen on six continents, ranges from live electronic performance to installations incorporating video, multichannel sound, and computer-controlled objects.

He is a freelance developer of interactive technology for artists, and teaches multimedia technology at NYU and is an Artist Mentor for the Sound Art program at Columbia University.

Educated as an electrical engineer, building instruments is what Mattijs enjoys most. Besides classic programming languages, he is an avid Max user and has been lead developer on all kinds of small and large digital art projects, receiving awards like a Cannes Gold Lion, Webby Award, Plaza Innovation Award and FWA.

Together with Hidde De Jong he founded Showsync, a startup that builds a platform for working with musically synchronized video and lighting. Showsync software has been used to run tours of artists like Feed Me and Kölsch, festivals like Dekmantel and Voltt, and performances by Asko|Schönberg Ensemble and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Miller Puckette is known as the creator of Max and Pure Data. As an MIT undergraduate he won the Putnam mathematics competition in 1979, but finished his PhD at Harvard in 1986. He was a researcher at the MIT Media lab from its inception until 1986, then at IRCAM, and is now professor of music at the University of California, San Diego. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia University and the Technical University of Berlin, and has received two honorary degrees and the SEAMUS award.

The music of New York-based composer Nina C. Young (b.1984) is characterized by an acute sensitivity to tone color, manifested in aural images of vibrant, arresting immediacy, with a musical voice draws from elements of the classical canon, modernism, spectralism, American experimentalism, minimalism, electronic music, and popular idioms.

Young’s works have been presented by Carnegie Hall, the National Gallery, the Whitney Museum, LA Phil’s Next on Grand, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music Series, while garnering international acclaim through awards such as the 2015-16 Rome Prize. Recent commissions include a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh from the Philadelphia Orchestra and a new work for the American Brass Quintet and EMPAC’s wavefield synthesis audio system.

A graduate of McGill University and MIT, Young completed her DMA at Columbia University. She is an Assistant Professor of Composition and Director of Electronic Music at UT Austin, and a Visiting Composer at the Peabody Institute. She is Co-Artistic Director of New York’s Ensemble Échappé.

From obtuse angles to intense physicality, Peder Mannerfelt’s highly individual take on techno demands attention and consideration. While his many-sided body of work reaches back more than a decade, the Swedish producer’s current investigations in the field of experimental dance music are as prolific as they are unpredictable. Employing subtle props and working with striking visual accompaniments, Peder Mannerfelt’s live shows bring the immediacy of his art front and centre in your cerebellum. It’s the perfect mutation of music still rooted in the kinetic energy of techno even as it seeks to break down the genre’s rigid, illusory formulae.

Rob Ramirez is a performance artist, DJ, and computer programmer based in Brooklyn, New York. He has performed and exhibited works at SAT (Montréal), MANCC (Tallahassee), EMPAC (Troy), Borusan (Istanbul), and the festivals Novelum (Toulouse), Fusebox (Austin), Push (Vancouver), and COIL (NYC).

Rob has collaborated with several multi-disciplinary artists, including Phil Soltanoff, Joe Diebes, Kurt Hentschlager, Koosil-Ja, David Watson, David Commander and is a member of the NYC based performance group Immediate Medium. He holds an M.S. in Integrated Digital Media from Brooklyn Polytechnic University, and is a developer on Cycling '74's Max media software. Rob was born in Asheville, NC.

Seth Cluett is a composer and visual artist who creates work that explores everyday actions at extreme magnification, examines minutae by amplifying impossible tasks, and tries to understand the working of memory in forms that rethink the role of the senses in an increasingly technologized society.

The recipient of grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Fund and Meet the Composer, his work has been presented internationally at venues such as The Whitney Museum, MoMA/PS1, Moving Image Art Fair, CONTEXT Art Miami, GRM, and STEIM. His concert work has been commissioned by ensembles ranging from the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and the International Contemporary Ensemble to So Percussion, Catch Guitar Quartet, and Clogs and is documented on Line, Sedimental, Notice, and Winds Measure recordings.

Cluett is the Acting Director of the Computer Music Center and Assistant Director of the Sound Art Program at Columbia University. He is also Artist-in-Residence with Experiments in Art and Technology at Nokia Bell Labs where he maintains a studio and is active in research on virtual and augmented reality acoustics and multi-sensory communication.

Tarik Barri (NL), based in Berlin, is an audiovisual musician and software developer. He programmes his own software to develop new tools for audiovisual performance and composition. Using these tools, Barri explores new synergies and aesthetics in combinations of image and sound. His work takes on various forms like installations, videos and AV performances where he frequently collaborates with artists like Thom Yorke, Paul Jebanasam and Robert Henke.