George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist, and trombonist. He is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music and Area Chair in Composition at Columbia University. In 2020-21 he was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study), and he currently serves as Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, and an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society.  Lewis’s other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work is presented by ensembles worldwide, published by Edition Peters. A Yamaha Artist, Lewis is widely regarded as a pioneer in the creation of computer programs that improvise in concert with human musicians.

Lewis’s central areas of scholarship include the history and criticism of experimental music, computer music, interactive media, and improvisation, particularly as these areas become entangled with the dynamics of race, gender, and decolonization. His most frequently cited articles on these topics include “New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps” (VAN Outernational, 2020) and “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives” (Black Music Research Journal, 1996). His widely acclaimed book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award. Lewis is the co-editor (with Harald Kisiedu) of the bilingual edited volume Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute (2023), as well as (with Benjamin Piekut) the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). Lewis’s many publications on technology include “Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager” (Leonardo Music Journal, 2000) and “Why Do We Want Our Computers To Improvise?” (Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music, 2018). Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New England Conservatory, New College of Florida, and Birmingham City University, among others.

John M. Chowning grew up in Wilmington, Delaware where he studied music through high school.  Following military service in a Navy band and university studies at Wittenberg University, he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris for three years where for the first time he heard electroacoustic music.  Aided by Max Mathews of Bell Telephone Laboratories and David Poole of Stanford, he set up a computer music program using the computer system of Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1964.  His initial research led to the first generalized sound localization algorithm implemented in a quad format in 1968.  In 1967 he discovered and developed an algorithm for generating complex sounds using frequency modulation (FM). This breakthrough in the synthesis of timbres allowed a very simple yet elegant way of creating and controlling time-varying spectra.  Inspired by the acoustic and perceptual research of Jean-Claude Risset in the domain of timbre, he worked toward turning this discovery into a system of musical importance, using it extensively in his compositions.  In 1977 Stanford University licensed the FM synthesis patent to Yamaha in Japan, leading to the most successful family of synthesizers in the history of electronic musical instruments.

Chowning was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988.  The French Ministre de la Culture awarded him the Diplôme d’Officier  dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1995. Chowning taught computer-sound synthesis and composition at Stanford University’s Department of Music and was the founding director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), which continues to be one of the leading centers for computer music and related research.

Mary Simoni is a composer, pianist, author, educator, consultant, and administrator. She currently serves as the Special Advisor to the Provost at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Professor Emerita, Performing Arts Technology at the University of Michigan. Her music and multimedia works have been performed in Asia, Europe, and throughout the United States and have been recorded by Centaur Records, the Leonardo Music Journal published by the MIT Press, and the International Computer Music Association. She is the recipient of the Prize in Composition by the ArtNET Virtual Museum and named a semi-finalist for the American Prize in Composition-Chamber Music. She has authored several books, including Algorithmic Composition: A Guide to Composing Music with Nyquist, co-authored with Roger Dannenberg, and Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music. She is a Medal Laureate of the Computer World Honors Award for her research in digital Music Information Retrieval.  Her work as a pianist and Steinway Artist specializes in the use of interactive performance systems that extend the sonic capabilities of traditional acoustic instruments. She has consulted for the Canadian Innovation Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Peace Foundation, and numerous universities and arts agencies throughout the world. The Knight Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs have funded her research.

Marc Battier is a composer of instrumental and electroacoustic music. After twenty years at Ircam, Paris, he became in 2002 full professor of musicology at Sorbonne University in Paris, now professor emeritus. In 2017, he received the award of the 1000 Talents experts plan of China and joined Shenzhen University (China) as distinguished professor. He also taught at the University of California at San Diego (1984-86), NYU and at the university of Music and Arts of Aichi, Japan (2018). He has been assistant to John Cage (in Paris), François Bayle (at GRM), Karlheinz Stockhausen and Joji Yuasa (at IRCAM).

He is a cofounding member of the ICMA and Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (EMS, 2003), founder and director of EMSAN (2007), a network studying the electroacoustic music of East Asia. 

He has written music for several Western and Asian musical instruments. He published many articles in Leonardo, Leonardo music Journal, Computer Music Journal and Organised Sound, and written several books and chapters on the history of electronic music. He is currently on the board of Organised Sound and honorary editor of Leonardo. He wrote articles for the New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments and The Grove Dictionary of American Music.

His latest book, Esthétique du son artificiel (Aesthetics of Artificial Sound), was published in France this year. Last year, he published in China Computer Music in the 21st Century. History and Practice.

In 2023, he became an ICMA director for Asia/Oceania. His music is published by BabelScores.

Experienced as a research leader and pioneer in music and audio technology, Adrian Freed focuses on inventive applications of computation and electronics. He invented the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) in 1985, the Audio Plugin in 1986, and Open Sound Control (OSC) in 1997. He has been involved in AI, NLP and ML projects since 1987. He maintains strong relationships with researchers, designers and developers in Industry, Academia and Vernacular communities. Mentoring and motivating teams around productive ideas is his super strength.

He is a Senior Software Developer at Adobe Inc. working on Premiere Pro Customer Experience.
He was Research Director of UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) during David Wessel’s tenure.

Laetitia Sonami is a pioneering French sound artist and performer known for her innovative use of technology in her work. Her sound performances, live-film collaborations and sound installations focus on issues of presence and participation.  She applies new technologies and appropriated media to achieve an expression of immediacy through sound, place and objects. A pioneer in wearable technologies, Sonami devised new gestural controllers for performance and created several unique instruments for live performance. In 1991 she devised her first lady’s glove. It became her primary instrument for the next 25 years at which point she devised the Spring Spyre which applies Machine Learning to real time control of audio synthesis. Sonami has collaborated with film makers and musicians, such as Paul DeMarinis, SUE-C, James Fei and Zeena Parkins.  Her collaborations with David Wessel include Nga’I pa yul (1997) and Music Mobile (~ 1999). Sonami has exhibited and performed at major international festivals and venues and has mentored many young artists in the field. https://sonami.net