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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
