Ben Harper grew up in Australia before relocating to London. As well as making audio-visual installations, he has most recently been working as a composer with live electronic feedback (both analogue and digital), spoken word, and music designed for users of cochlear implants. His music, writing and visual art is based upon the conscious imitation of others to observe the nature of originality, and the removal of technique as a vehicle for musical expression. His public appearances have been rare, seldom venturing out of his bunker in East London, where he nurses his obscurity, mistaking it for genius. Over the past twenty years he has succumbed to pressure on a handful of occasions to present some of his music or artwork to the public in a small gallery or bar.
Bill Alves is a composer based in Southern California, where he teaches at the Claremont Colleges, co-directs LA’s MicroFest, and directs the HMC American Gamelan, a just intonation ensemble originating in his Fulbright Fellowship in Java and Bali, Indonesia. He is the author of Music of the Peoples of the World and coauthor of Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick. His other writings have appeared in 1/1, the Computer Music Journal, Perspectives of New Music, and elsewhere. His recordings are available from MicroFest Records, Kinetika Video Library, and other labels. More information is at billalves.com.
Daniel Corral is a composer and sound artist born and raised in Eagle River, Alaska. In Los Angeles since 2005, his work includes accordion orchestras, multimedia microtonal electronics, puppet operas, handmade music boxes, site-specific sound installations, chamber music, and intermedia collaborations. Corral’s music has been commissioned and presented by venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Sundance Film Festival, Banff Centre, Joe’s Pub, REDCAT, Iceland University of the Arts,Walt Disney Concert Hall, Hammer Museum, MoCA LA, Göteborg Art Sound Festival, USC, Center for New Music, CSUN, Pianospheres, and the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts. Corral taught at CalArts 2016-2020. Corral is currently working towards his Ph.D in Music Composition at UCSD.
Dylan Crismani is an Australian composer, instrument maker, and lecturer in music at The University of Adelaide. Dylan's compositional style aims to fuse American minimalism with European spectralism and microtonality.
Gary David has led two lives simultaneously: musician and epistemologist. He was a professional jazz musician for 20 years. In the 60’s he formed a group called The Sound of Feeling, an innovative vocal-instrumental group. They recorded two albums for Verve, and Mercury records. Both won Grammy nominations. Studied pitch theory and practice with Erv Wilson from 1964 to 1995. Simultaneously, starting in 1964, Gary began his studies in epistemology, the theory of knowledge with J. Samuel Bois who was his mentor for the next 12 years. In 1975, he received a Ph.D. in epistemics. Since 1999, he has been engaged in a private counseling practice, as well as giving online seminars. called The Art of Learning with learning being the action by which we extend presence into the world. It has at its core his 40 year study of the biology of human emotion as the primary motivational system of the human being.
Greg Schiemer is an Australian electronic music composer and instrument designer. A former student of Peter Sculthorpe, his music since the early 1970s became increasingly allied with the design of interactive analog and digital instruments, much of it in collaboration with dance. During the 80s and 90s, he produced live public interactive radio events such as the Concert on Bicycles and The Talk Back Piano. He has lectured in Composition and Music Technology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music before being appointed Director of the interdisciplinary Sonic Arts Research Network at the University of Wollongong. He was recipient of an Australia Council Composition Fellowship at CSIRO Division of Radiophysics, Epping, NSW and Visiting Associate Research Fellow at the Interactive and Digital Media Institute at the National University of Singapore. His Pocket Gamelan - a network of microtonally tuned java phones developed with support from the Australian Research Council - laid foundations for developing the Satellite Gamelan mobile phone app.
John H. Chalmers is a retired astrobiologist and prebiotic chemist from the University of California, San Diego. In addition to working in the fields of genetics, industrial microbiology, biochemistry and chemistry, he has had a long-term interest in microtonality and is the author of “Divisions of the Tetrachord,” a book inspired in part by Ervin Wilson’s work. Chalmers is also an actor with the Village Church Community Theater in Rancho Santa, California, where he resides, and has recently become a computer artist, having exhibited his music-theory generated polychrome plots in a number of venues in San Diego and one in San Francisco.
Grady works as the archivist of the works of musical theorist Erv Wilson and as the cultural liaison for Anaphoria Island. His own work involves using concepts of meta-culture realized in composing music for his instrumental ensembles in Just Intonation and special recurrent sequences. These are often combined with shadow theatre, installation and film. He prefers the term mesotonal (over microtonal) to further define a relation with theatrical anthropology and medical ethnomusicology .
Canadian composer of Ukrainian descent Marc Sabat (*1965) has been based in Berlin since 1999. He makes pieces for concert and installation settings, drawing inspiration from investigations of the sounding and perception of Just Intonation and of various music forms — folk, experimental and classical. He is a frequent collaborator, seeking fruitful interactions with other musicians and artists of visual and literary modes to find points of shared exploration and dialogue between various forms of experience and different cultural traditions.
Marcus Hobbs is a software developer focused on both creating software tools and using them to create visual and musical art. His first career was at Walt Disney Feature Animation whereas a digital artist he developed software used to create 3D artwork for Lion King, Pocahontas, Hercules, Atlantis, and Mickey’s Philharmagic, and Meet the Robinsons. He is currently developing mobile application software synthesizers that support microtonality, particularly focused on implementing the works of musical scale designer Erv Wilson. His iPhone and iPad application “Wilsonic” implements many of Wilson’s scale designs with interactive parameters so that musicians and composers can customize these designs to suit their values. He is a developer of “AudioKit Synth One”, a free open source additive software synthesizer which can import scales designed in Wilsonic.
Margo Schulter has been interested in European medieval, Renaissance, and Manneristic music since 1966; in 1998, John Chalmers of Xenharmonikon invited her to join the Alternate Tuning List, she saw Xenharmonikon 17, and was fascinated by what she read. In 2001-2002, she had the precious opportunity to collaborate with George Secor in an exploration of his 17-tone well-temperament of 1978; this process led her to explore Near Eastern music, as well as isoharmonic sonorities and Kathleen Schlesinger's superparticular melodic series. Jacky Ligon was a vital formative influence, and later Ozan Yarman and Jacques Dudon and Stephen Pohlit. She lives in Sacramento, California.
Born in New Zealand in 1961 Michael learnt piano with his grandmother, horn and composition with his father. Composition is a significant part of his musical life, having written for a variety of ensembles along with songs and percussion works. A considerable number of his compositions include intervals from the harmonic series, extended just intonation. His music is published by Wirripang Pty Ltd (www.australiancomposers.com.au). From 2017 he has been co-curating SydneyMicroFest, an annual event of microtonal music. He has a blog exploring brass instruments, harmonics and just intonation, (bwhisperer.com) and a composition service thenotewhisperer.com.au. Micahel has held full-time playing positions with a number of Australian orchestras including that of Principal Horn in the Queensland Philharmonic Orchestra. He is now a regular with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra (playing natural horn), Opera Australia Orchestra and freelances mostly in Sydney. Chamber music credits include his ensemble LOCANA and Omega Ensemble. Teaching is an important part of Michael's work with schools in Sydney including Inaburra School. In 2011 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong after having previously been awarded an MPhil in composition from the University of Queensland and MMus in Musicology from Griffith University.
Paul Johnson (b. 1997) studied composition with David Vayo and Kyle Shaw, and has composed chamber pieces based on large-scale processes structured improvisation, and game rules. He holds a degree in mathematics and physics from Illinois Wesleyan University, and is interested in Erv Wilson's combinatorial and graph theoretic approaches toward tuning spaces. He is currently pursuing instrument building, and wants to use Harry Partch's "Corporiality" as a unifying concept for both popular and spectral composition.
Praveen S. Venkataramana considers himself a Wilsonian in approach and has composed a variety of chamber, solo, and electronic pieces in various tuning systems. He is mostly self-taught in music but he studied cello with Rich Eckert, South Indian music with Neyveli Santhanagopalan and composition with Keeril Makan. He received a Philip Loew Memorial Award for creative accomplishment at MIT and his music has been performed by the ensembles Either/Or and Sound Icon.
Stephen has composed most all the scores for the films of legendary Academy Award winning director, Charles Burnett, as well as the musicals, comedies and dramatic films of Robert Townsend. In 2009 Academy Award nominated producer Reginald Hudlin tapped him to write the main title song and underscore for the limited animated series, The Black Panther. His body of work encompasses shows and films from all the major studios. The score to Richard Tanne's feature film, "Southside With You" , received rave reviews, and his classical orchestral works have been performed by the Atlanta Symphony (1996 Olympics Opening Ceremonies), the Detroit Symphony and the Cleveland Symphony. After receiving his music degree from Stanford he went on to study privately for several years with Henri Lazarof (composition professor at UCLA), Dr Albert Harris (conducting), and microtonal scale pioneer, Ervin Wilson.
Warren Burt (b. 1949) is a composer, performer, instrument builder (both acoustic and electronic), sound poet, video maker, writer and educator. Originally from the USA (he studied in Albany NY with Joel Chadabe and in San Diego with Robert Erickson and Kenneth Gaburo), he moved to Australia in 1975 and has mostly been based around Melbourne ever since. His PhD (2007 University of Wollongong) is a survey of 35 years of microtonal composing activity. He is currently (2019) Coordinator of Master’s Programs in Music at Box Hill Institute, Melbourne.
A recovering Interaction Designer originally from California, Lucija is currently enjoying life along the sea in Split, Croatia or sipping Turkish coffee in Sarajevo's Old Town. The instruments of Harry Partch and Terry Riley's "Shri Camel" were her spirit animals while working on Xenharmonikon.