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.
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.
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.
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.