Quarantine Sessions #45 | 1 Year Anniversary

—Henrik von Coler
The Quarantine Sessions are realized using free and open source technologies, which can be adopted by anyone: 
JackTrip (audio)
Jitsi (video)

OBS (streaming)

Noah Berrie is a composer, violinist, and current Stanford undergraduate from New York. He is interested in machines and music, sound installations, virtual space, instrument-building, contemporary acoustic composition, the modern pop landscape, and generally future-thinking music. He studies at CCRMA and is involved with several organizations, including the Stanford New Ensemble, PIGs, and KZSU. More info can be found at his website-in-progress: noah-b.xyz 

Michele Cheng, a 1.5 generation Taiwanese American, is an interdisciplinary artist who uses music, experimental theatre, and other forms of media to be in dialogue with social issues and cultural identities. Taking a journalistic approach through interviews and research, she develops creative projects that reflect on complex issues in hopes of broadening public understanding as well as her own awareness.Her works have been performed around the world at places including Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon (Dijon, France), Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast, Northern Ireland), Podium Gigant (Apeldoorn, Netherlands), Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal (Montreal, Canada), National Theatre & Concert Hall (Taiepi, Taiwan), as well as Bing Concert Hall (Stanford, CA), Orange County Museum of Arts (Santa Ana, CA), Experimental Media Performance Lab (Irvine, CA), Emerson Paramount Theatre (Boston, MA), among others. She has been featured by Sonorities Festival Belfast (Belfast, UK), New Music Gathering (Portland, OR), White Snake Project (Boston, MA), UCI Illuminations (Irvine, CA), She Scores Festival (Pittsburgh, PA), Vu Symposium (Park City, UT), and eavesdropping symposium (London, England). She is a co-founder of the interdisciplinary feminist improv collective fff. She’s currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Hassan Estakhrian is a composer, performer (vocalist & multi-instrumentalist), songwriter, intermedia artist, and producer. He collides genres of music that span across rock, jazz, and contemporary classical and incorporates extramusical elements and electronics. His assortment of works include sci-fi rock operas, chamber-funk pieces, musical games with graphic scores and improvisation, and intermedia stories based in fantasy and science fiction. Hassan writes and records songs under the band name— Antenna Fuzz. He is currently a doctoral candidate in music composition at Stanford University. More at antennafuzz.com.

Emily Graber is an interdisciplinary performer and researcher. She has recently been living in the Toronto area, performing chamber music and contemporary works while researching music therapy for hearing rehabilitation as a postdoctoral fellow at the Sunnybrook Research Institute.  At the University of Michigan, she studied violin performance as well as interdisciplinary physics, then earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University at CCRMA. Her research focused on how performers and listeners experience and/or engage with musical tempo changes. 

Mantautas Krukauskas – composer and sound artist, Associate Professor at the Department of Composition of Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in Vilnius, where he is also a co-founder and Head (since 2016) of Music Innovation Studies Centre, academic lab for studies, art and research, with a focus on music technology, innovation in music and music education, interactive arts, immersive media, and interdisciplinarity. His compositions, including chamber music, sound art and other works, music for theatre and dance productions have been performed in Lithuania, Austria, Germany, France, Canada, USA, and other countries. Professional profile also includes electronic music performance and work within creative industries sphere with music production and arrangement. Mantautas Krukauskas has been actively involved in diverse field of activities, including coordination and management of international artistic, research and educational programmes. His interests comprise interdisciplinarity, creativity, music and media technologies, and a synergy of different aesthetic and cultural approaches.

Jonathan Impett is Director of Research at the Orpheus Institute and Associate Professor at Middlesex University (London, UK). Jonathan’s professional and research activities cover many aspects of contemporary musical practice, as trumpet player, composer and theorist. He also leads the research cluster “Music, Thought and Technology” at the Orpheus Institute. His research is concerned with the discourses and practices of contemporary musical creativity, particularly the nature of the contemporary technologically-situated musical artefact. In the field of historical performance, he is a long-standing member of both The Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century and The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra. He is also a member of the experimental chamber ensemble Apartment House. As a soloist he has given premieres of works by composers including Scelsi, Berio, Harvey and Finnissy. He directed the live electronic chamber ensemble Metanoia, and was awarded a Prix Ars Electronica for his development of the metatrupet. His compositions have been broadcast throughout Europe. As an improviser he has played with musicians as divers as Paul Dunmall and Amit Chaudhuri. Work in the space between composition and improvisation has led to continuous research in the areas of interactive systems and interfaces. The current ‘active sound space’ project uses ALife populations of wave models to create interactive works combining aspects of composition and sound art. A monograph on the music of Luigi Nono has recently been published by Routledge, and Jonathan is currently working on a project considering the nature of the contemporary musical object, ‘The work without content’. 

Bonnie Wai-Lee Kwong is a poet, playwright and multidisciplinary artist who creates in many languages: English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, ruby, javascript, and C++. Her first book of poetry is ravel. Her first play, Liriope, was staged at Stanford University's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Her second play, There's No Stopping to My Thoughts, was staged at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center with a grant from the California Arts Council.

Sarah Weaver, Ph.D. is a New York-based contemporary composer, conductor, technologist, educator, and researcher working internationally as a specialist in Network Arts. Weaver has composed solo, chamber, and large ensemble works for groundbreaking musicians for over twenty years, integrating influences of jazz, contemporary classical, improvisation, computer music, world music, and innovative individual music languages of performers. She is an innovator of live performance via the internet by musicians and artists in different geographic locations, encompassing numerous artistic projects with collaborators and interdisciplinary projects with groups such as NASA Kepler/K2 Mission and United Nations. Weaver is the Director of NowNet Arts Inc. and the Sarah Weaver Ensemble. She hold the degrees Bachelor of Music with Education Certificate from the University of Michigan, Master of Music - Music Technology from New York University, and Ph.D. in Music Composition from Stony Brook University. SyncSource LLC is the managing business for Weaver’s compositional work, teaching engagements, technology applications, and recording and publishing label. Weaver is a member of ASCAP, College Music Society, New York Women Composers, and National Association of Composers.

Originally from Beijing, Dr. J. Cecilia Wu (AKA: Wu Xiao Ci) is a scholar, musician, multimedia technologist, audio engineer, maker, and natural communicator. She has 10 years of diversified working experience in media arts and technology companies such as the Universal Music Group, EMI Records, Taihe Media, and Shazam Entertainment. From 2013 to 2018, she worked in the field of higher education on multiple jobs in a variety of settings while conducting her Ph.D. research. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Music, Science, and Technology from Stanford University and a Ph.D. degree in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California Santa Barbara. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at the College of Arts and Media at the University of Colorado Denver. As a scholar, she was a Central Campus Fellow of the University of California and a U.S. National Academy of Sciences Sackler Fellow. As an audio engineer, she received a two-year-long graduate grant award from the Audio Engineering Society (AES). As a musician, she received an award from the California State Assembly for being a positive role model in sharing Chinese culture. As a media artist, she received the “Young Alumni Arts Project” Grant Award from Stanford University. As a hybrid posthuman, she possesses different languages and vocabularies in arts, science, engineering, and social science disciplines. Her work has been exhibited at museums and international arts and engineering society such as the National Museum of China, Denver Art Museum, SEAMUS, NIME, ICMC, IEEE, and AES. Her multimedia work <Virtual Mandala> has been selected by the Denver Art Museum for their permanent collection. Dr. Wu is also a Creative Research Collaborative (CRC) Fellow at the University of Colorado. She is trilingual in spoken and written English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. Working proficiency in French. 

Constantin Basica is a Romanian composer living in the San Francisco Bay Area (CA), whose current work focuses on symbiotic interrelations between music, video, and performers. His pieces have been featured at festivals and conferences such as MATA Festival (New York, NY), the International Festival for Video art and Visual Music (Mexico City, MX), Currents New Media Festival (Santa Fe, NM), the International Week for New Music and the InnerSound International Festival for New Arts (Bucharest, RO), next_generation Festival at ZKM (Karlsruhe, DE), the 2016 Sound and Music Computing Conference (Hamburg, DE), and Aveiro_Síntese International Festival of Electroacoustic Music (Aveiro, PT). He received the ICMA Award for Best Submission from Europe at the 2017 ICMC in Shanghai (CN). Constantin earned a DMA in Composition at Stanford University (CA) under the guidance of Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, Brian Ferneyhough, Mark Applebaum, and Erik Ulman. He holds an MA degree in Multimedia Composition from the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre (DE) and two BA degrees in Composition and Conducting from the National University of Music Bucharest (RO). Currently, Constantin is a postdoctoral scholar and the concert coordinator at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

Chris Chafe is a composer, improvisor, and cellist, developing much of his music alongside computer-based research. He is Director of Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). At IRCAM (Paris) and The Banff Centre (Alberta), he pursued methods for digital synthesis, music performance and real-time internet collaboration. CCRMA's SoundWIRE project involves live concertizing with musicians the world over. Online collaboration software including jacktrip and research into latency factors continue to evolve. An active performer either on the net or physically present, his music reaches audiences in dozens of countries and sometimes at novel venues. A simultaneous five-country concert was hosted at the United Nations in 2009. Chafe’s works are available from Centaur Records and various online media. Gallery and museum music installations are into their second decade with “musifications” resulting from collaborations with artists, scientists and MD’s. Recent work includes the Brain Stethoscope project, PolarTide for the 2013 Venice Biennale, Tomato Quintet for the transLife:media Festival at the National Art Museum of China and Sun Shot played by the horns of large ships in the port of St. Johns, Newfoundland.

Henrik von Coler is a musician and researcher in the field of electronic and electroacoustic music. He is currently working at Audio Communication Group, TU Berlin, where he is director of the Electronic Music Studio. In his compositions and performances he is focusing on the us of low-tech elements in state-of-the-art technical systems, combining vintage sound generation and erroneous systems with sound field synthesis systems. He is founder of the Electronic Orchestra Charlottenburg, a group of 10 musicians performing live electronic music with modular synthesizers and other instruments on large loudspeaker setups.

Jonathan Impett is Director of Research at the Orpheus Institute and Associate Professor at Middlesex University (London, UK). Jonathan’s professional and research activities cover many aspects of contemporary musical practice, as trumpet player, composer and theorist. He also leads the research cluster “Music, Thought and Technology” at the Orpheus Institute. His research is concerned with the discourses and practices of contemporary musical creativity, particularly the nature of the contemporary technologically-situated musical artefact. In the field of historical performance, he is a long-standing member of both The Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century and The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra. He is also a member of the experimental chamber ensemble Apartment House. As a soloist he has given premieres of works by composers including Scelsi, Berio, Harvey and Finnissy. He directed the live electronic chamber ensemble Metanoia, and was awarded a Prix Ars Electronica for his development of the metatrupet. His compositions have been broadcast throughout Europe. As an improviser he has played with musicians as divers as Paul Dunmall and Amit Chaudhuri. Work in the space between composition and improvisation has led to continuous research in the areas of interactive systems and interfaces. The current ‘active sound space’ project uses ALife populations of wave models to create interactive works combining aspects of composition and sound art. A monograph on the music of Luigi Nono has recently been published by Routledge, and Jonathan is currently working on a project considering the nature of the contemporary musical object, ‘The work without content’.
 

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano enjoys imagining and building things, fixing them when they don't work, and improving them even if they seem to work just fine. The scope of the word "things" is very wide, and includes computer hardware and software, controllers, music composition, performance and sound. His music blurs the line between technology and art, and is as much about form and sound processing, synthesis and spatialization, as about algorithms and custom software he writes for each piece. He has been working in multichannel sound and diffusion techniques for a long time, and can hack Linux for a living. At CCRMA, Stanford University since 1993, he combines his backgrounds in music (piano and composition), electronic engineering and programming with his love of teaching and music composition and performance. He discovered the intimate workings of sound while building his own analog synthesizers a very very long time ago, and even after more than 30 years, "El Dinosaurio" is still being used in live performances. He was the Edgar Varese Guest Professor at TU Berlin during the Summer of 2008. In 2014 he received the Marsh O'Neill Award For Exceptional and Enduring Support of Stanford University's Research Enterprise.

Juan Parra Cancino studied Composition at the Catholic University of Chile and Sonology at The Royal Conservatoire The Hague (NL), where he obtained his Masters degree with focus on composition and performance of electronic music. In 2014, Juan obtained his PhD degree from Leiden University with his thesis “Multiple Paths: Towards a Performance practice in Computer Music”. His compositions have been performed in Europe, Japan, North and South America in festivals such as ICMC, “Sonorities”, “Synthese”, and “November Music”, among many others. His acousmatic piece Serenata a Bruno obtained a special mention at the Bourges electroacoustic music competition of 2003 and in 2004, his piece Tellura was awarded with the residence prize of the same competition. Founder of The Electronic Hammer, a Computer and Percussion trio and Wiregriot, (voice & electronics), he collaborates regularly with Ensemble KLANG (NL) and Hermes (BE), among many others. His work in the field of live electronic music has made him recipient of numerous grants such as NFPK, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and the International Music Council. Since 2009 Parra is a fellow researcher at the Orpheus Institute (Ghent, BE), focused on performance practice in Computer Music.

Trummerschlunk (audiolith, lemme records, hold your ground)
Trummerschlunk performs slow techno that immerses into a modular synthesizer-driven soundscape and invites to a sci-fi inspired journey toward big questions and amorphous feelings. In real life, Klaus Scheuermann is a Berlin based mix- and mastering engineer with allmost 20 years of experience in jazz and electronic music.