Welcome to ICMC HAMBURG 2026! Showcasing pieces by Alexander Schubert, Nicole Brady, Anthony Paul De Ritis, Aigerim Seilova and Steffen Lohrey, and Clarence Barlow, the opening concert takes places at the Recital Hall of the iconic Elbphilharmonie.

Following the opening concert, registered conference participants are warmly invited to a reception in the Recital Hall Foyer for an opportunity to meet artists, researchers, and fellow attendees in an inspiring setting overlooking Hamburg’s harbor.  

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Hyunmook Lim; Paulo C. Chagas; Andrea Agostini

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Axel Berndt, Aida Amiryan-Stein, Manuel Peters, Meinard Müller and Stefan Balke; Mário Pereira, António Sá Pinto, Treasa Harkin and Gilberto Bernardes, Gilberto Bernardes; Nádia Moura and António Sá Pinto

Breathwork is a twelve-channel sound installation where loudspeakers become breathing bodies. Each loudspeaker is encased in an inflatable bag that swells and contracts in response to low-frequency drones, forming a slow, ever-shifting breath-like choreography.

Faulty Oracle is an adaptive audiovisual installation that conjures a gloriously unreliable divinatory machine. Visitors pose questions through body language: gestures, movements, postures which the system interprets, misreads, and willfully transforms. In return, the oracle delivers cryptic animated answers, flickering between epiphany, nonsense, and hallucination.

A camera installed on a balcony captures the live sky, converting it into generative sound in real time.

Fixed media pieces by: Salvatore Siriano; Liuyang Tan and Tan Liuyang; Keisuke Yagisawa; Yiting Shao; Cristiano Riccardi; Qing Ye and Yuxue Zhou; Yerim Han; Weijia Yang; Wanjun Yang; Jinwoong Kim; Talia Amar, Talia Amar and Talia Amar; Jingfan Guo; Shih-Lin Hung and Ju An Hsieh; Yunpeng Li  

Fixed media pieces by: Ayako Sato; Guanjun Qin; Chufan Zhang, Jun Wang and Qi Liu; Akiko Hatakeyama; Seongah Shin; Boyi Bai; Ed Osborn; Adrian Kleinlosen; Yu Linke

The Elephants of Trianon is an augmented-reality audiovisual installation that extends a series of public murals into an interactive spatial sound environment. The original work consists of ten adjacent murals painted on garage doors in a public alley in Evanston, Illinois, USA.

an egg with fouled neurons is a variable duration installative performance on a synthesizer fully coded by the composer in MaxMSP which utilizes a post-tonal framework to transform large harmonic sets, preserving the fidelity of harmonic intervals while transforming harmonic identity, allowing for movement through a complex harmonic pattern.

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Hiroshi Yamato OrbitScore; Yuan Zhang and Xinran Zhang; Colton Arnold, Zhaohan Cheng and Ajay Kapur

Omniopticon invites visitors to step inside a constantly shifting field of sound.

MËSH is an immersive, networked music and media system that blends interactive installation with live performance. Developed since 2019, MËSH uses a distributed array of interactive nodes to create a responsive audiovisual environment. Depending on the venue, installations range from 4 to 16 interconnected nodes communicating over a wireless local network.

De/Re:Generation stems from a speculative question: would cicadas sense acoustic information during the up to 17 years they live underground, before emerging from the soil for a brief adult phase marked by intense acoustic display? From this perspective, the installation approaches sound not only as an auditory phenomenon, but as something sensed through the body, making vibration and tactile perception central to the experience.

Composers: Sever Tipei, Claudia Robles Angel, Michael Edwards, Rodrigo Cadiz, Sunhuimei Xia and Sunhuimei Xia

ICMC HAMBURG 2026 welcomes this year's conference community to Hamburg. On this first full conference day, the team shares a few words about the week's program before Robert Henke gives his keynote about his life as a toolmaking artist. 

Robert Henke examines selected works of his from a critical toolmaker’s perspective: did he reinvent the wheel again, or did he achieve an artistic outcome which justifies the effort?

The goal of this hands-on workshop is to show, for the first time in an international context, the Antony system, now in its final state and fully functional.

Composers: Richard Dudas, Vincenzo Russo, Rikako Kabashima, Mara Helmuth et al., Kotoka Suzuki, Yu Chung Tseng

Composers: Riccardo Ancona; Brian Lindgren; Riccardo Mazza; John C.S. Keston; Nicola Leonard Hein and Viola Yip; Kasey Pocius; Danilo Randazzo

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Tianze Zhang, Shingyui He and Lei Xuan; Juan Carlos Vasquez and Zhonghao Chen; Rob Canning

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Amir Abbas Orouji, Ayoub Banoushi and Gilberto Bernardes; Nikolaus Knop; Ruby Crocker, Lucas Ong and George

This workshop offers hands-on experience with Full House, a multimodal soundscape system designed specifically for participatory spatial composition. Through a real time data driven architecture, the system transforms the manipulation of physical objects into continuous spatial sound and visual processes.

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Rodrigo Cadiz; Solomiya Moroz, Nicolo Merendino and Massimo Sterlino; Orm Finnendahl

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Rolf Bader and Simon Linke; Tim Ziemer; Simon Linke, Rolf Bader and Robert Mores

Breathwork is a twelve-channel sound installation where loudspeakers become breathing bodies. Each loudspeaker is encased in an inflatable bag that swells and contracts in response to low-frequency drones, forming a slow, ever-shifting breath-like choreography.

Faulty Oracle is an adaptive audiovisual installation that conjures a gloriously unreliable divinatory machine. Visitors pose questions through body language: gestures, movements, postures which the system interprets, misreads, and willfully transforms. In return, the oracle delivers cryptic animated answers, flickering between epiphany, nonsense, and hallucination.

A camera installed on a balcony captures the live sky, converting it into generative sound in real time.

Nuclear reactions in stars create a wide variety of chemical elements, starting from hydrogen — in Carl Sagan’s words, 'by a kind of stellar alchemy’. This process is known as stellar nucleosynthesis. Helium Burning is conceived as a generative system that addresses the affordances of such astronomical processes to explore timbral plasticity through digital sound synthesis in an 8-channel sound installation.

This workshop introduces MESH, a portable, wireless system for distributed music performance and interactive installation. Designed as a flexible alternative to infrastructure-heavy networked ensembles, MESH enables performers to create spatially distributed musical systems using compact, self-contained nodes that communicate over a wireless network.

Fixed media pieces by: Sam Wells; Zihan Wang and Wenxin Zhou; Robert Sazdov ; Sebastiano Naturali; Yunze Mu; Clemens von Reusner; Youngjae Cho; Primrose Ohling; Iván Ferrer-Orozco; Andrea Laudante, Paolo Montella and Giuseppe Pisano; Teerath Majumder; Yu Qin; Wei Yang; Gabriel Araújo; James Harley; Raul Masu and Francesco Ardan Dal Ri

Fixed media pieces by: Hyewon Kim; Rodney Waschka; Chun-Han Huang; Vadim D. Genin; Adam Stanovic; Takumi Harada; Ziyu Pang; Ray Tsai; Giancarlo Alfonso

The Elephants of Trianon is an augmented-reality audiovisual installation that extends a series of public murals into an interactive spatial sound environment. The original work consists of ten adjacent murals painted on garage doors in a public alley in Evanston, Illinois, USA.

Omniopticon invites visitors to step inside a constantly shifting field of sound.

MËSH is an immersive, networked music and media system that blends interactive installation with live performance. Developed since 2019, MËSH uses a distributed array of interactive nodes to create a responsive audiovisual environment. Depending on the venue, installations range from 4 to 16 interconnected nodes communicating over a wireless local network.

De/Re:Generation stems from a speculative question: would cicadas sense acoustic information during the up to 17 years they live underground, before emerging from the soil for a brief adult phase marked by intense acoustic display? From this perspective, the installation approaches sound not only as an auditory phenomenon, but as something sensed through the body, making vibration and tactile perception central to the experience.

TBA

Composers: Huixin Xue; Benjamin Broening; Wan Heo, Wan Heo and Wan Heo; Jonathan Wilson; Christopher Dobrian; Mark Whitlam

In this lecture, Falk Hübner will offer various examples of such socially engaged artistic research projects, and discuss the persona of the artist-researcher as a "connector" and the methodological consequences such a positionality implies. From this perspective, he develops a series of questions to the field of computer music, to explore and discuss bridges and potential connections between topics of socially engaged artistic research and the disciplines and discourses of (research in and through) computer music. 

The workshop combines a presentation and discussion of the artistic and technical background with a hands-on opportunity to test SONA – Diving in the Dark.

This panel explores how artistic and creative systems can be understood through physiological and physical models of perception, cognition, and material interaction.

Composers: Riccardo Dapelo; Ching Lam Chung; Yongbing Dai and Yiping Bai; Nicolas Kummert; Cecilia Suhr; Jean-Francois and Charles Ramin Roshandel

Composers: Fernando Lopez-Lezcano; Jules Rawlinson; Atsushi Tadokoro; Nicola Casetta; Julian Green; Doron Klant Sadja; Aaron Einbond

More info to follow

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Jeff Kaiser and Gregory Taylor; Nicolas Brochec and Jean-Louis Giavitto; Minami Kojima, Takayuki Itoh and Rafael Ramirez

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Laura Call Gomez, Gabriel Decker, Jayson Faupel, Aditya Rajesh Pawar, Jacob Westerstahl, Henrik von Coler; Teresa Carrasco; Mauro Cantonetti, Paolo Malpeli, Alessandro Anatrini

Three papers will be presented and discussed: Giovanni Roma and Alba Francesca Battista; Abhirup Saha, Hans-Ulrich Berendes, Meinard Müller and Ben Maman; Yu Foon Darin Chau and Andrew Horner

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Felipe Otondo and Leonardo Santos; Yu Chia Kuo; Piero Poli

Faulty Oracle is an adaptive audiovisual installation that conjures a gloriously unreliable divinatory machine. Visitors pose questions through body language: gestures, movements, postures which the system interprets, misreads, and willfully transforms. In return, the oracle delivers cryptic animated answers, flickering between epiphany, nonsense, and hallucination.

Breathwork is a twelve-channel sound installation where loudspeakers become breathing bodies. Each loudspeaker is encased in an inflatable bag that swells and contracts in response to low-frequency drones, forming a slow, ever-shifting breath-like choreography.

A camera installed on a balcony captures the live sky, converting it into generative sound in real time.

SuperCollider, being a free and open-source project, stands in contrast to non-open projects in that it doesn’t impose technical and legal barriers to users accessing and modifying its inner workings.

Fixed media pieces by: Mikel Kuehn; Joan Tan; Taito Fushimi; Andreas Weixler; Wonseok Choi; Hector Bravo Benard; Tom Bañados Russell; Felipe Tovar-Henao; Kim Hedås; Sean Peuquet; Juan Carlos Vasquez; Wen-Chia Lien; Tomás Koljatic S.; David Nguyen; Hanae Azuma; Jong Gyun Kim

Fixed media pieces by: Jeonghun Hyun; Thanos Polymeneas-Liontiris; Ray Tsai; Juan J.G. Escudero; Emilio Casaburi; Yi-Hsien Chen; Pingting Xiao; Xiaoyu Su; Pak Hei Leung

SURROUNDINGS is a site-specific sound installation that transforms walking, listening, and spatial memory into a continuously unfolding sonic environment. The work is built from GPS-tracked field recordings captured through attentive movement in and around the exhibition site.

The Elephants of Trianon is an augmented-reality audiovisual installation that extends a series of public murals into an interactive spatial sound environment. The original work consists of ten adjacent murals painted on garage doors in a public alley in Evanston, Illinois, USA.

oscheat is a work-in-progress multi-user interface based on OSC. Its purpose is to simplifyand formalise shared, real-time control of musical parameters across an ensemble. Instead of separating instruments by performer, oscheat functions as a collective parameter space in which all participants can change each other’s instrument sound generation, spatialization, tonal systems or rhythmic structures.

Composers: Juan Vassallo; Yoonjae Choi; Heloise Garry; Masatsune Yoshio; Mikako Mizuno; Richard Scott

Zirkonium is a free spatialized sound environment for the ZKM | Hertzlab, formerly ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics, which wraps various spatialization algorithms and abstracted speaker layouts with a path sequencing interface designed for composers in mind.

Three pieces & papers will be presented. Composers/authors: Raphael Radna; Kyle Smith; Nikos Baskozos

Panelists: Fabian Czolbe, Bernd Härpfer, John Chowning, Anne Wellmer; Moderator: Georg Hajdu

Join us for the ICMC HAMBURG 2026 Banquet at the exceptional Speicher am Kaufhauskanal – one of Harburg’s most atmospheric historic venues.

Composers: Fernando Egido; Juan Arturo Parra Cancino; Jonathan Wilson; Enrique Tomás and Moisés Horta Valenzuela; Se-Lien Chuang and Andreas Weixler; Oscar Corpo; Rob Canning; Denis Polec Vocal 

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Adriano C. Monteiro and Rafaela B. Pires; Guanjun Qin and Yunxuan Jia; Sitong Wu and Jinshuo Feng

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Neal Anderson and Sanjay Majumder; Sam Pluta and Ted Moore; Jeremy Hyrkas

This workshop introduces Oscilla, a browser-based framework for animated, cue-driven graphic scores in which performance semantics are embedded directly into SVG notation. Rather than separating score, control system, and playback environment, Oscilla treats the score as a single executable surface—authored visually in Inkscape and enacted in real time via a lightweight browser runtime.

Two papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Alexandre Francois; Robert Esler; Tian Cheng, Tomoyasu Nakano and Masataka Goto

Breathwork is a twelve-channel sound installation where loudspeakers become breathing bodies. Each loudspeaker is encased in an inflatable bag that swells and contracts in response to low-frequency drones, forming a slow, ever-shifting breath-like choreography.

A camera installed on a balcony captures the live sky, converting it into generative sound in real time.

Faulty Oracle is an adaptive audiovisual installation that conjures a gloriously unreliable divinatory machine. Visitors pose questions through body language: gestures, movements, postures which the system interprets, misreads, and willfully transforms. In return, the oracle delivers cryptic animated answers, flickering between epiphany, nonsense, and hallucination.

Fixed media pieces by: Zoe Yi-Cheng Lin; Yuming Sun; Shunhang Huang; Takeyoshi Mori; Chi Wang; John Thompson; Woon Seung Yeo and Ji Won Yoon; Dave O Mahony; Xingle Zhang; Ouyang Mingshan; Ji Won Yoon and Woon Seung Yeo; Bike Öner; Tom Williams

Fixed media pieces by: Felipe Otondo; Yu-Cheng Huang; Leo Cicala; Chen Mu Hsi; Ye Peng; He Jing; Ray Fields; Antonio Scarcia; Lia Su

SURROUNDINGS is a site-specific sound installation that transforms walking, listening, and spatial memory into a continuously unfolding sonic environment. The work is built from GPS-tracked field recordings captured through attentive movement in and around the exhibition site.

The Elephants of Trianon is an augmented-reality audiovisual installation that extends a series of public murals into an interactive spatial sound environment. The original work consists of ten adjacent murals painted on garage doors in a public alley in Evanston, Illinois, USA.

More info to follow

Composers: Roberto Cipollina and Eleonora Podestà; Henrik von Coler; Yao Hsiao; Rodrigo Pascale; Natsuki Kambe; Zhixin Xu and Yunze Mu

Music unites listeners through shared predictions and reward. At the heart of this process is the musical scale—a designed object that quantizes pitch into structures capable of generating and fulfilling expectation. A survey of the world’s scales reveals five core design features and a single overarching dimension of enculturation, ranging from deeply familiar tonal systems to entirely novel sonic environments.

Two papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Sophie Rose; Yunze Mu, Lorna Segall and Zhixin Xu

How does the world sound when we truly listen? In this participatory workshop, participants explore their sonic environment through attentive listening, simple drawing, poetry, and playful composition — no musical experience required.

Panelists: Lars Rye Bertelsen, Pia Preißler, Miriam Akkermann, Li Xiaobing, and Li Zhong

Composers: Lidia Zielinska; Zihan Wang; Howard Kenty; Naotoshi Osaka; Yixuan Zhao; Javier Alejandro Garavaglia; Danni Zhao and Congren Dai

Fixed media pieces by: James A. Moorer et al.; Jingyu Luo; Jeffrey T.V.; João Pedro Oliveira; Deniz Caglarcan; Haozhe Tan; Li Pengyun and Guo Jingfan; Justyna Tobera

Composers: Gintas Kraptavicius; Calvin McCormack; Jonathan Impett; Moritz Wesp, Eric Haupt and Victor Gelling; Paulo C. Chagas; Cat Hope and Juan Parra Cancino; Andrew Loveless

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Fabian Ostermann; Eun Ji Oh, Jun Woo Beck and Alexandria Smith; Penelope Bekiari and Anastasia Georgaki

Three papers will be presented and discussed. Authors: Bob Sturm and Elin Kanhov; Ling Qi, Teng Ma and Alexandria Smith; Changda Ma et al.

Four pieces & papers will be presented. Composers/authors: Christopher Trapani; Jocelyn Ho et al.; Xiangbin Lin; Yuan Zhang and Xinran Zhang

The origins of computer music promised unlimited freedom for composers to make music using sounds that no acoustic instrument could make. This freedom comes with a price.

This workshop explores the rich interdisciplinary space that lies between computer music composition and scientific inquiry, focusing on sonification as a shared methodology, bridging between disciplines, rather than a discipline-specific technique.

This 2.5-hour workshop examines four musical agent systems through a structured process of presentation, performance, collective listening, and critical discussion. It addresses a central contemporary question in computer music: how the design of musical agents encodes particular modes of listening, interaction, and agency, and how these design choices shape musical practice.

Composers: Jeff Kaiser; Minho Kang; Eric Lyon; Ilia Viazov and Nicola Leonard Hein; Nicola Leonard Hein; Dong Zhou; Olivier Jambois

Three studio reports will be presented. Authors: Takeyoshi Mori; José Ricardo Barboza and Gilberto Bernardes; Ludger Brümmer, Götz Dipper and Dan Wilcox

Two studio reports will be presented. Authors: Hefang Ma, Jingyu Luo, Paul Francis, Mara Helmuth, Sangbong Nam and Wei-Huai Chen; Pedro Rebelo and Craig Jackson

Fixed media pieces by: Giovanni Crovetto; Matteo Tomasetti, Francesco Casanova, Andrea Veneri, Vili Pääkkö and Andrea Strata; Ziwei Yang; Tolga Yayalar; Leonidas Spiliopoulos

Nicola Giannini; Neal Farwell; Mathieu Lacroix; Rikhardur H. Fridriksson; Daniel Mayer; Allison Ogden; Jan Jacob Hofmann; Vilbjørg Broch; Daniel Gomes; Aleksandar Zecevic and; Kiran Bhumber; Martin Heinze; Cristian Gabriele Argento

Fixed media pieces by: Faming Qin; Varun Kishore; Chun-Han Huang; Nattakon Lertwattanaruk; Silvia Matheus; Paul Oehlers; Tekstil Nayaka Adinata and Muhammad Welderahmat; Keming Zeng; Yufen Qiu; 璟 李

Composers: Yisong Piao; Miller Puckette and Kerry Hagan; Marc Ainger; Tiffany Skidmore and Patti Cudd; Patti Cudd; Konstantinos Karathanasis

Works by: Michael Trommer; Julian Rubisch; Xingxing Yang; Yuxin Chen; Emanuele Sara; Arne Eigenfeldt, Jim Bizzocchi and Simon Overstall; Yongwoo Lee

Demos by: Takayuki Rai and Haruka Hirayama; Walker Smith; Matthias Jung; Kieran McAuliffe et al.; Charles Hutchins and Shelly Knotts; Juliana Lüer et al.; Luca Morino, Nicola Conci and Fabio Cifariello Ciardi; Riccardo Mazza; Mohammad Sadeghi

Composers: Nicolas Brochec; Jian Feng; Yi-Tzu Huang; Sarah Proske; Franz Danksagmüller; S. Ali Hosseini; Pierre Alexandre Tremblay

Composers: Eric Honour; Drew Farrar; Joshua Rodenberg and Fumiaki Odajima; Yue Zhang; Dennis Scheiba; Anqi Liu and Han Zhang

Join us in celebrating this year's ICMC in Hamburg! Following the final club concert, there will be an after party with DJs playing at Stellwerk Hamburg.