Listening Room 1

Fixed Media | Program Overview

Perseverance: An Artist Rendering
Mikel Kuehn

The Archival of Memory in Skin
Joan Tan

#paris
Taito Fushimi

Asymmetric Stamina
Andreas Weixler

CHAOTIC ITINERANCY
Wonseok Choi

Corrosion Chamber
Hector Bravo Benard

Dew
Tom Bañados Russell

Fully Automated Luxury Music (selected tracks)
Felipe Tovar-Henao

Lein
Kim Hedås

On the transparency of seeing through
Sean Peuquet

The Eternalist Paradox
Juan Carlos Vasquez

Unwritten Glow
Wen-Chia Lien

Vox Dei
Tomás Koljatic S.

Whale Song Stranding
David Nguyen

Where am I in the Universe?
Hanae Azuma

Droplet
Jong Gyun Kim

 

About the pieces & artists

Mikel Kuehn: Perseverance: An Artist Rendering

In late February of 2021, I was astonished to discover that NASA made several raw recordings of the recently landed Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover available to the public. Inspired by the first ever recorded (atmospheric) sound from another planet, I began fantasizing about what the sonic environment of Mars might be like. This piece was constructed solely from four recordings capturing the sounds of the Martian wind, the rover driving, the rover’s mechanical parts (dust blower and various moving components), and the laser shots used to examine the properties of rocks. One additional recording was used: the inflight noise of the heat rejection fluid pump (recorded through the mechanical parts since there is no actual sound that propagates thought the vacuum of space). These minimal source sounds were then processed, spatialized, and combined/expanded into various suggestive textures. The result is my “artist rendering” of a fantastical narrative of the Rover’s journey though the sonic landscape of Mars. Its title is also a nod to the perseverance within each of us as we learn to navigate through the global pandemic. Perseverance: An Artist Rendering opens with an imaginary camera zooming from deep space onto the lonely flight of the spacecraft as it sets up for entry into the Martian atmosphere, then lands. In the short sequence immediately following, most of the source sounds that are used to build the piece are exposed in context with the work’s formal narrative. From this moment on, the journey moves from fairly literal to fictional, even absurd, as the rover drives though multiple sonic terrains such as a “machine” sequence, a “thunderstorm,” then encounters various “creatures” as it continues on its strange journey and eventual death.

About the artist

The music of American composer Mikel Kuehn has been described as having “sensuous phrases… producing an effect of high abstraction turning into decadence,” by New York Times critic Paul Griffiths. He has received awards from the Barlow Endowment, the Chicago Symphony, Composers, Inc., the Copland House, the Destellos Competition on Electroacoustic Music, the Alice M. Ditson Fund, the Flute New Music Consortium, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the League of Composers/ISCM, and the Ohio Arts Council. Kuehn is professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music where he directs the Electroacoustic Music Studios @ Eastman (EMuSE). mikelkuehn.com

 

Joan Tan: The Archival of Memory in Skin

I am a conflux of cultures — shaped by environments and circumstances I do not fully understand. A living juxtaposition of beliefs, a contradiction of behaviours. An oxymoron. I’m learning to hold all of these parts together. The piece is built from sound fragments that remind me of childhood: Hokkien soap operas and theatre shows my grandma watched, the voices of children at the playground where I once used to play, the creaking of old treadle sewing machines, the static of ageing radios, the ticking of analogue clocks, the English news on TV at 8pm usw. These unlikely combinations of sounds flitter between one another, at times dissonant, jarring even, but always coexisting. When the physical world inevitably fades, I hope their voices will still remain.

About the artist

Joan Tan Jing Wen (born 21 April 2000) is a Singaporean composer currently based in Cologne, Germany. Her recent works places attention, perception and the fallibility of memories at the forefront of her compositions. She is fascinated by how attention constructs and distorts one’s perceptions, and shapes one’s entire experience, both in music and in everyday lives. She believes that every sound triggers a sensory response, engages ones imagination and evokes emotions through associations. Recognisable sound sources are distorted in her works, leaving behind crafted gestures and faint memories of what they once were.

 

Taito Fushimi: #paris

#paris is a piece developed during a one-month stay in Paris. It uses audio data circulated on social media and associated with specific locations, treating these recordings as the environmental sounds of those places. The collected audio is processed through AI learning and generation, and subsequently recomposed to form the final sound composition. On social media platforms, cities are primarily consumed as visual objects. On platforms such as Instagram, on-site sound environments are often replaced by trending music or narration, and are intentionally muted or edited. As a result, these audio elements begin to function as urban soundscapes formed within media, distinct from those of the physical city. This work applies this approach to representations of Paris on social media. By presenting Paris as an auditory experience composed of multiple, overlapping layers mediated through digital platforms, the work explores the relationship between sound circulating in digital space and the city, and offers a reconsideration of how contemporary urban environments are perceived.

About the artist

Taito Fushimi. Born in Aichi Prefecture in 2003. He is currently a fourth-year student in the Faculty of Policy Management at Keio University, where he belongs to Akira Wakita Lab.

His practice focuses on sounds, traces, data, and bodily sensations that are not treated as primary information within urban environments, but are instead pushed into the background. Working across diverse media including installation, sound, materials, and participatory works, he recontextualizes elements that exist within the city yet are processed as noise. Through his works, he seeks to reconsider how the city is perceived.

 

Andreas Weixler: Asymmetric Stamina

The electroacoustic multichannel composition was created during a Composer-in-Residence at the VICC – Visby International Composers Centre in Sweden in 2025 in Studio Alpha. All sounds were recorded on the island of Gotland. Studio recordings of electric guitar and voice processed in real time form a fundamental musical framework of the composition. A special source of inspiration were the weekly gatherings of automobile enthusiasts every Wednesday at the harbor of Visby. Carefully restored vintage cars, American cruisers, and newly modified vehicles – all equipped with powerful V8 engines, even a motorcycle. These deep resonant sounds became a central element of the sonic world, contrasted by the presence of young car posers noisily circling through the night. This urban soundscape stood in striking opposition to the dramatic cries of the seagulls and the creaking of the floating piers in the Baltic Sea harbor. Production tools have included Pro Tools with plugins such as GRM SpaceGrain, Sound Particles Brightness Panner, R360 surround reverb, Seventh Heaven 5.1, Acon Multiband Dynamics, and Stratus Reverb 7.0, as well as Max programming for multichannel live processing, including granular synthesis, spectral delay, FFT filtering, ring modulation, and FFT freeze reverb. Credits: Field Recordings: Author2, Author1 Voice: Author2 Composition, electric guitar & real-time Processing (Max): Author1 The creation of this work was supported by The Swedish Arts Grants.

About the artist

Andreas Weixler, born 1963 in Graz, Austria, is a composer for computer music with an emphasis in intermedia realtime processing. He is teaching at the mdw Vienna, InterfaceCulture in Linz and serves associate university professor at the CMS – computer music studio of Anton Bruckner University in Linz where he initiated the intermedia concert hall the Sonic Lab. Studies of contemporary composition at KUG in Graz, Austria with diploma by Beat Furrer, completed by international projects and residencies.

 

Wonseok Choi: CHAOTIC ITINERANCY

‘CHAOTIC ITINERANCY’ is a power electronics piece realizing harsh noise and glitch textures. Simple signals pass through an effects chain aimed at heavy distortion to gain saturated textures. Here, they lose their original forms and are rebuilt into new ones. The listener perceives the deconstructed sound and its remaining essence simultaneously. As the processing shifts, the listener is placed right in the middle of the distorted sounds’ itinerancy. Three sections themed ‘Accumulation’, ‘Mutation’, and ‘Derivation’ form chaotic textures using different methods. They share a goal of presenting fragmented sensations. Yet, because the methods differ, the area where itinerancy is felt and the character of the textures become distinct. Through this process, I sought to find possibilities in excessively damaged materials. I also intended to sonically map this itinerancy by controlling methodologies and detailed elements.

About the artist

Wonseok Choi (b. 1999) is a composer who pursues music situated at the boundaries of genres and media. In the realm of electronic music, he constructs sounds using signal distortion and degradation as primary materials, while in the acoustic realm, he focuses on works that embody post-minimalism and alt-classical styles. His works have been presented by the Korea Electro-Acoustic Music Society (KEAMS), and he is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Electroacoustic Music Composition at Hanyang University.

 

Hector Bravo Benard: Corrosion Chamber

This composition integrates computer-generated sounds with recordings of struck and bowed metal plates. Over time, these materials are transformed, recursively processed, and spatially projected within an immersive environment surrounding the listener. As the piece unfolds, the sonic textures grow progressively denser and more chaotic, gradually distorting and ultimately destroying their original source. The title Corrosion Chamber evokes devices used to test the resilience of metals exposed to harsh conditions over time. It also alludes to metaphorical “chambers,” such as those of government institutions, where the original intent of laws and policies can be eroded and twisted to serve power at the expense of the public good. It also suggests the decay of rational thought within social-media echo chambers and through the careless use of AI tools. The piece was originally produced in 7th order Ambisonics.

About the artist

Hector Bravo Benard. Originally from Mexico City, he studied philosophy and music at the University of Victoria (Canada), and later at the Xenakis Centre (France), the Institute of Sonology and the Royal and Rotterdam Conservatories (Netherlands), the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the University of Washington’s DXARTS Center (USA), and the University of Birmingham (UK), where he received his Ph.D. He composes sound-based music for acoustic instruments, live electronics, and fixed media, with a focus on timbral and spatial elements, and natural phenomena such as non-linear dynamical systems. Some of his main teachers over the years include Agostino Di Scipio, Julio Estrada, Scott Wilson, Clarence Barlow, Paul Berg, Gilius van Bergeijk, René Uijlenhoet, Gerard Pape, Carla Scaletti, Michael Longton, Christopher Butterfield, Andrew Schloss, and Alex Dunn. His works have been presented internationally at events such as ICMC, BEAST FEaST, MA/IN, SEAMUS, Gaudeamus, NYCEMF, Sonorities Belfast, Espacios Sonoros, ACMA, FIMNME, Sound/Image London, and the Kyma International Sound Symposium. He currently lives in the Netherlands and Germany, working as an independent artist, researcher, and music software developer.

 

Tom Bañados Russell: Dew

Dew is a concept piece built around a simple but flexible process that allows for great musical expression and freedom depending on the situation. It can be set up for a large variety of speaker setups and durations. The concept is based on a Haiku by Kobayashi Issa: This world of dew is a world of dew, and yet, and yet It focuses on change through repetition, impermanence and the complex being built around the simple. While the piece could theoretically last for ever, it must eventually end.

About the artist

Tom Bañados Russell is a Chilean composer and electronic music performer. They completed a bachelor in composition at the PUC Chile, with a following Master’s degree in the HMTM-Hannover in 2026. Their most recent work has focused on duos between an instrumental musician and live electronics. Their music has been performed by a variety of groups at festivals such as Klangbrücken and Impuls Academy, by performers such as the Elision Ensemble. Among other accolades, they received the Scholarship for Musical Excellence of the PUC and the Lower Saxony Scholarship for Innovative Composition.

 

Felipe Tovar-Henao: Fully Automated Luxury Music (selected tracks)

Track selection from the upcoming album, “Fully Automated Luxury Music”: 3. caprice 6. waltz 8. nocturne Fully Automated Luxury Music (F.A.L.M) is an open-source, generative music album. The music is written as, and generated through, stochastic algorithms—probabilistic, rule-based processes designed to produce finely structured yet potentially infinite variants of a musical output, in the form of audio files. The code is end-to-end (E2E), meaning it generates and assembles the entire album from scratch—in other words, it’s a fully reproducible and parameterized work. This album serves primarily as a proof of concept for open-source music—a still recent and under-explored compositional practice (see, for instance, Pierre Cusa AKA Pure Code’s Ambient Garden Album)—and as a reflection on recent developments in AI automation, what they mean for the future of artistic practice, and how human expression can remain central to algorithmic design. The title is a wink and nod to Aaron Bastani’s popular book, “Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto”, which offers a cautiously optimistic, though increasingly unlikely, utopian vision of technology’s impacts on society.

About the artist

Felipe Tovar-Henao is a US-based multimedia artist, developer, and researcher whose work explores computer algorithms as expressive tools for human creativity, cognition, and pedagogy. His music is often motivated by and rooted in transformative experiences with technology, philosophy, and cinema, and it frequently focuses on exploring human perception, memory, and recognition. As a composer, he has been featured at a variety of international festivals and conferences, including TIME:SPANS, the International Computer Music Conference, the Mizzou International Composers Festival, the Ravinia Festival, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, WOCMAT (Taiwan), CAMPGround, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, CLICK Fest, the SCI National Conference, the SEAMUS National Conference, the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, CEMICircles, IRCAM’s CIEE Summer Contemporary Music Creation + Critique Program and ManiFeste Academy, Electronic Music Midwest, and the Midwest Composer Symposium. He has also been the recipient of artistic awards and distinctions, including the SCI/ASCAP Student Commission Award and the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award. He is currently Assistant Professor of AI and Composition at the University of Florida.

 

Kim Hedås: Lein

Lein is music that stems from the history of both organ music and electroacoustic music. Although these two fields have followed different paths through history, they share some similarities, not least through experiments that explore and expand both space and time. By listening backwards, certain lines of origin can be transferred from the past to the present, sometimes clear and recognisable, sometimes distorted and fragmented. Microscopic units of rhythm form polyphonic lines as well as alloys of sound, dynamically connecting what was previously unconnected. Lein is a multichannel fixed-media piece that has been performed at concerts and festivals in Sweden, Germany and at New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival 2025. In June 2025, Lein won two prizes at the international acousmatic composition competition at the Weimarer Frühjahrstage Festival in Germany: Second Prize and the Audience Award.

About the artist

Kim Hedås, born 1965, Swedish composer and researcher, PhD, Professor of composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm (Kungliga Musikhögskolan) and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music (Kungl. Musikaliska Akademien).

 

Sean Peuquet: On the transparency of seeing through

R. Murray Schafer pointed out in 1977 that our soundscape is increasingly lo-fi, often the sound of traffic or, especially at the Atlantic Center for the Arts where this piece was composed, planes. While quiet is harder to come by, there are wonderful new sounds too, like the spray-paint can clicking of a hard-disk failure or powering on a belt sander. And yet, we increasingly fetishize a return to not just natural soundscapes, but the natural. Once we frame nature as being different (as a thing to return to), reality becomes an appearance of itself— obfuscating the naturalism of architecture, pharmaceutics, and software engineering under a guise of transparency. Are we ourselves not the nature to which we desire to return? In the “broken” appearance of this composition’s soundscape, perhaps we can hear ourselves in relation to the natural world as, echoing William Carlos Williams, “touched but not held, more often broken by the contact.”

About the artist

Sean Peuquet is a composer and educator. He presents his work regularly at national and international venues for contemporary art and music such as ICMC (Limerick, Daegu, Shanghai, Utrecht, Ljubljana, Belfast), SMC (Cyprus), NYCEMF, TIES (Toronto), KEAMS (Seoul), Sines and Squares (Manchester, UK), SEAMUS, SCI, EMM, VU Symposium, and more. In 2022, Sean’s piece “Plane of Slight Elevation” (2021) was awarded Best Music: Americas by the ICMA. He has received numerous commissions for concert music, installations, and artist workshops at venues including Communikey (CMKY), The Ellie Caulkins Opera House, and Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Denver. In 2020, Meow Wolf commissioned Sean to compose an immersive and generative music and sound installation as part of their permanent Denver exhibition space, Convergence Station, opening to the public in 2021. Sean has been artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, FL and ART 352 in Fort Collins, CO. Sean is Dean of Art + Design and an Associate Professor at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design in Denver, CO. Prior to becoming Dean, he served as Chair of the Music Production department at RMCAD for 5 years. Between 2015 to 2020, Sean was the Program Director and Lead Music Instructor for the Madelife Creative Accelerator program in Boulder, CO.

 

Juan Carlos Vasquez: The Eternalist Paradox

“The Eternalist Paradox” is an 8-channel acousmatic piece recorded with a chromatic button accordion and live electronics. It explores the paradoxical realm of eternalism, where past, present, and future coexist. Through an intricate interplay, a Max application implemented processes from recordings sourced from diverse eras of creation, intricately woven into a singular texture. This repurposed musical journey challenges conventional notions of time and invites the audience to contemplate the profound interconnections within the ever-flowing river of existence.

About the artist

Dr. Juan Carlos Vasquez (www.jcvasquez.com) boasts a remarkable trajectory as an award-winning composer, video game researcher, and academic. His creations, ranging from spatial audio works to immersive interactive experiences and game art, have resonated across continents, being featured in over 30 countries spanning the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Dr. Vasquez is currently an Assistant Professor in Computation and Design at Duke Kunshan University

 

Wen-Chia Lien: Unwritten Glow

Unwritten Glow is an Acousmatic piece that illustrates how memories return in elusive and shifting ways. The “glow” evokes the lingering fragments that surface within us when we are remembering, an inner brightness that is gentle, persistent, and never fully graspable. Memory changes each time it resurfaces, it may become blurred, clearer, softened, or quietly altered. Sounds return in new shapes, much like moments that reappear unexpectedly and never quite as they once were. This piece is not about a story, but a space where subtle memories drift in and out, inviting listeners to follow their own past and find their own version of the “glow” in the unfolding sonic world. This piece views memory as a living, shifting presence rather than a fixed archive of experience.

About the artist

Wen-Chia Lien is a Taiwanese composer and sound artist whose creative practice spans instrumental, electroacoustic composition, film scoring, and experimental theatre. Her works often engage with social issues, historical events, and cultural inquiry, seeking to integrate music and technology as a medium for dialogue and reflection between sound, space, and audience. Wen-Chia is currently pursuing a Master of Music at the University of Toronto. She earned her Bachelor of Music in Music Theory and Composition from the University of Taipei in 2024. In recent years, she has delved into multimedia creation and electronic music. In 2025, she participated in ilSUONO Contemporary Music Week. Her orchestral work, Scars, received Third Prize in the 2024 Composition Competition of the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra (NTSO) and was premiered by NTSO. Her electroacoustic piece In Our Stomach was selected to perform at the 2023 C-LAB Sound Festival: Diversonics, and she was a selected visiting artist for the C-LAB × IRCAM Communication Program in the summer of 2024. In 2023, she was the music designer for Skin Box, a theatre and dance production that was presented at the Taipei Fringe Festival. Her artistic work has been recognised with several awards, including the 2024 Taiwan Ministry of Education Study Abroad Scholarship and the 2025 University of Toronto France–Canada Experience Award.

 

Tomás Koljatic S.: Vox Dei

Vox Dei is a multichannel acousmatic musical composition inspired by the sounds of the popular Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe of Ayquina. This traditional Catholic celebration takes place annually on the eve of September 8th, bringing together thousands of pilgrims in the heart of the Atacama Desert (Antofagasta Region), Chile. Based on field recordings I made in 2023 and 2024, the piece explores the fervor, devotion, and unique soundscape of this festival, where music, dance, and faith intertwine in a collective experience of celebration and sacrifice. The sound material for the work was captured at different moments of the feast: songs and prayers of the pilgrims, the brass and percussion bands that accompany the religious dances (playing disparate, overlapping music at full volume in close proximity), the voices of those arriving after long desert pilgrimages, and the climactic moment of the celebration when thousands of devotees sing “Happy Birthday” to the Virgin Mary. This exceptionally rich sonic material is not subjected to extensive electroacoustic processing. Instead, it is deployed to create an immersive experience that transports the listener to the heart of this festival and invites us to reflect on the power of sound as a vehicle for spirituality.

About the artist

Tomás Koljatic S. is a Chilean composer. After studying music and mathematics in his country, he continued his higher education in composition at the Paris Conservatory (CNSMDP), where he studied with professors Frédéric Durieux (composition), Claude Ledoux (analysis), Denis Cohen (orchestration), Luis Naón, Tom Mays, and Karim Haddad (new technologies). Simultaneously, he completed advanced training in music technology at IRCAM (Cursus 1). Currently, he works as a professor at UC | Chile Faculty of Arts, teaching courses in music analysis and history.

 

David Nguyen: Whale Song Stranding

Inflections as sound process to sound quality
Emanating otherness of the
Sound quality to sound process from the reflective

Resulting in an immersive rhizome-like sound world of the
omnipresent of the dream like and the very literal

As different zones are successive, simultaneous, above,
below, before, and after, to neither rise nor sink but only
float

A longing as the friction, disputes of the literal and
dream-like

And

A persistence of a pulse, heavy, through the literal as a
constant movement and the abstract ingenuous stillness, a
sound world of the discursive and the narrative

Chiastic process and quality is undermined as the
reflections and inflections recur in rounded proportions.
The immersive and form is only tangible through this
insistence that is perceived as a dream occurring in
real-time

Figuratively
Whale Song suggests, quite literally, uncertainty that is

Stuck between the discursive and the narrative,
The moving streams/waves and the pure tones surrounding
within,
Stranding

About the artist

David Quang-Minh Nguyen is an audio engineer, sound designer/re-recording mixer, and composer of concert music. His current interests lie in composing acousmatic works that explore multi-channel loudspeaker expansion, various types of sound spatialization, and immersive audio.

 

Hanae Azuma: Where am I in the Universe?

An acousmatic piece, “Where Am I in the Universe?” for 8 channels, is remixed from the 16-channel version (original, 2017). It was inspired by the poem “Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude” by the Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa (1931 – 2024). Most of the harmonies in this piece are adapted from standard chords on the sho, a Japanese free-reed musical instrument.

Here is the abstract/my interpretation of the poetry:
Two billion light-years must show how enormous the universe is. The Earth is just part of the universe. Human beings on this small planet are tiny things in the universe. We might feel so lonely if we think about ourselves in the huge universe. But the very last sentence “I suddenly sneezed” makes me think about our real life and the comparison between the reality we face and the universe we could think/imagine. (Reference: TANIKAWA, Shuntaro, translated by William I. Elliot and Kazuo Kawamura, (2008), “Two-Billion Light-Years of Solitude” SHUEISHA Inc.)

This poem also reminds me that I sometimes feel overwhelmed that I am just one of the people on Earth. I sometimes feel fear that I might be the only person in the world/the universe because nobody can see in my mind. On the other hand, I know I am living surrounded by people. I’m trying to show this comparison and the solitude that people might have in this piece.

About the artist

Hanae Azuma is a composer from Tokyo, Japan, completed both her BM and MM at Tokyo University of the Arts, Department of Musical Creativity and the Environment. During her studies in Japan, she mainly concentrated on the relationship between music and other visual/performing arts such as dance and films and has been collaborating with contemporary dancers on various projects as a composer. She also completed her MM of music technology at New York University in 2014. Her works have been presented at music festivals and concerts in the United States, Japan, Korea,Taiwan and so on. She is currently an academic fellow at Acoustic Lab, Tokyo University of the Arts.

 

Jong Gyun Kim: Droplet

This work is an artificial ambient soundscape centered on the sonic textures of water droplets. By integrating actual recordings of falling water with textures reconstructed through heterogeneous materials such as PET bottles, the piece juxtaposes natural and synthetic audio elements. It aims to capture the organically evolving rhythms and textures of liquids, while establishing a three-dimensional sense of perspective within the soundscape through the manipulation of auditory distance and variations in textural density.

About the artist

Jong Gyun Kim is a South Korean composer specializing in electronic music. He earned his undergraduate degree from Senzoku Gakuen College of Music under Takeyoshi Mori, transitioning from a classical music background. His artistic portfolio includes presentations at CCMC in Japan, ICMC and NYCEMF. Currently, he is continuing his research and composition as a Master’s student under Richard Daniel Dudas at the Graduate School of Music, Hanyang University.