Cube Fest 2026 - Spoken Words

New-Ear ::SPATIAL
Otherwise Possibilities of Conversation

A program of 8-channel compositions from our archive of performances hosted in New York City as CT::SWaM (Contemporary Temporary:: Sound Works and Music). This program features three duets, or conversations, between artists, instruments, machines, and creative minds, each of which reflects on the place of shared language between interlocutors.

Merche Blasco’s work, Conversations with Anette, explores what listening and conversation may mean between human and non-human collaborators. Her interlocutor, Anette, is a 3D printer that Blasco assembled on her own. In this piece, Blasco converses with Anette and amplifies her machinic voice through electromagnetic pickups.

In their piece, Something Between Us, longtime collaborators Matt Sargent and Dani Dobkin offer a unique and evocative perspective on the conversation between electric and electronic instruments. Dobkin and Sargent’s modular synthesizer and electric guitar invite the listener to attend to a dialogic improvisation that traverses the boundaries of aesthetics and genres.

Written for and featuring the late bassist Robert Black, Marcel Zaes’ Moments of Doubt is a sonic exploration of layering and repetition that asks the listener to delve into the discomfort of uncertainty and doubt. Through cyclical motion of varying rhythms, Zaes and Black meditate on time and the place of machines between electronic and acoustic compositions and instruments.

The term Otherwise Possibilities is one we borrow from religious studies scholar Ashon Crawley. In his book, Black Pentecostal Breath, Crawley introduces otherwise possibilities as a way of resisting the fixity of what is, an opportunity to orient our attention to possibilities that may evade the eye and ear when approached from a normative standpoint, but would open a door to new ways of being otherwise. We hope that our program will invite listeners to reflect on legibility and the will to listen to those whose language may be foreign to us.

Born out of CT::SWaM (Contemporary Temporary:: Sound Works and Music) in 2024, ::SPATIAL is New-Ear’s spatial sound concert series. New Ear ::SPATIAL features works made (or adapted) for our octophonic cube and hosts two types of events — the ::SPATIAL Sets, which feature two to three artists per night, and Long-Forms, which is intended for either generative, through-composed, or improvised works that can and should be played for several hours to unravel.

Merche Blasco is an interdisciplinary artist and composer based in New York. Her work involves designing and building imprecise technological assemblages that catalyze new listening modes and embodied forms of live composition in electroacoustic sounds.

Dani Dobkin is a New York City-based sound artist, composer, and educator currently working at the intersection of sound and ceramics. Recently their work has engaged with ideas of grief, decay, ephemerality, and circuit design.

Matt Sargent is a composer, guitarist, and music technologist based in upstate New York. His work grows from interests in resonance, computer models of intelligence, and the making/breaking of long-form patterns.

Marcel Zaes Sagesser is an artist and researcher investigating how humans are increasingly intertwined with their technologies. Focusing on the material qualities of sonic media, his work reimagines environments that let us listen to human-technological relations.

Peter Otto
A-Ronne Remix

Presented here is the premiere of a multichannel remix of Berio's great piece, A-Ronne. Berio confided that A-Ronne, a “radiophonic documentary” for eight singers, was his favorite of his many works. Berio was intensely interested in spatial audio and would likely be in favor of such a project.  A-Ronne (“from A to beyond Z”, as the last letter of the old Italian alphabet is Ronne) is based on a poem written explicitly for the work by the Italian avant-garde poet Eduardo Sanguineti. The text is filled with biblical references, Joyce, Dante’s Inferno, the Communist Manifesto, Beckett’s Endgame, and others.  A vivid spatial remix serves to untangle the complex overlapping sonic and lingual sonorities of stereo and reveal the detail, breadth, and depth of this intensely musical, seminal work.

Classically trained in performance and composition, Peter Otto completed graduate work at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 1984 and continued there on faculty for several years. His vita includes long associations with Morton Subotnick and Luciano Berio (Tempo Reale) and studies and collaborations with Mel Powell and Roger Reynolds. He held faculty appointments at UCSD as music technology director and as founding director of the Sonic Arts R&D group at UCSD's Qualcomm Institute. Current work includes revising and conserving Subotnick’s ghost pieces for instruments and electronics for music publisher Schott, and new creative work in his newly constructed auditory imaging studio/lab in San Diego.

Anthony T. Marasco and Alexis Bacon
Host Your Ghosts

Host Your Ghosts is an interactive performance experience that explores communal musicking through audience-provided audio recordings, a repurposed Ouija board, and a custom-made motion tracking planchette interface. The piece features two distinct opportunities for participant interaction, one decentralized from the main performance space and designed to be experienced solo, and the other designed to bring people together to perform in a co-located space. At its core, Host Your Ghosts examines Ouija’s multifaceted legacy, which has seen it play the role of a collaborative mediation tool for those seeking to communicate with otherworldly forces, a taboo toy marketed to adventurous young adults, and even as the subject of fury for members of conservative religious movements during the Satanic Panic of the 1970s and 1980s.

Anthony T. Marasco is a composer, sound artist, and instrument designer who takes influence from the aesthetics of today's digimodernist culture. His music and installations showcase emerging technologies to highlight their creative flexibility, combining interactive sensor systems and cyber-hacked circuit-bent hardware with modular synthesizers and tabletop sound computers. Marasco is an assistant professor of music composition and technology and the director of the Electronic Music Studios and the MSU Future Instruments Lab at Michigan State University.

Alexis Bacon is a composer recognized nationally and internationally for her acoustic and electroacoustic music. Her work draws inspiration from a diverse array of sound worlds, including vanishing American oral traditions, medieval Provençal poetry, Norwegian fiddle music, and Afro-Brazilian religious ceremonies. A Fulbright scholar in France, she completed undergraduate studies at Rice University and graduate studies at the University of Michigan. Bacon is an associate professor of music composition at Michigan State University.

Paul Rudy
Time Seeds: A Prairie Cosmogram

A multichannel sound meditation installation, Time Seeds: A Prairie Cosmogram is shaped by listening to the prairie across time. Field recordings, spectral transformations, and participatory mobile sound provide a chronophonic map of the land’s geological, ecological, ancestral, and future-facing temporal strata. These layers invite the experience of time vibrating at its own density, coexisting within a single, cohesive sonic experience.

The sound resonates like layers of geology accreting upon the land, and invites vertical listening, a kind of borehole through which these temporal layers may be explored and experienced at once. Sounds enter and recede, sometimes gathering briefly before drifting apart again, as weather and seasons do. What is heard as ancient, living, or emergent is not separate, but the same material witnessed at different temporal scales.

Paul Rudy is a composer, sound artist, and educator whose work explores sound as a medium for presence, perception, and relationship. He creates performances, installations, and participatory listening environments that invite embodied attention and shared meaning. His practice spans composed music, sound healing, land-based work, and collaborative projects integrating ecology, community, and care. Based in the Kansas City region, Rudy works across concert halls, galleries, care centers, and outdoor environments, dissolving the boundary between art and life through sound.

Paul Koonce
To Think of Rain

In 11 short episodes, To Think of Rain (2021) explores the magical realism of rain as it touches, inhabits, and shapes our lives. Short poetic texts spoken by a returning narrator introduce each episode and inspire the freewheeling auditory tableaux that follow. A contrapuntal weave of everyday sound objects, actions, and events fill each scene in an illustration of its new anthropomorphic vision of rain. The position and movement of sound objects play a central role in the work, as it draws upon the opportunities of the 24-channel wave field array for which it was composed.

Paul Koonce studied composition at the University of Illinois and the University of California, San Diego, where he received the Ph.D. in music. His music focuses on issues of representation and perception in electroacoustic sound. He has developed computer software for the manipulation of timbre and space, most recently using wave field synthesis and a portable 24-channel speaker array developed by the composer. He holds the position of professor emeritus of music at the University of Florida.

Ka Hei Cheng
Phantom of Utopia II: The Convergence

The Phantom of Utopia series consists of three movements that depict and reference Tao Yuan-Ming’s The Peach Blossom Spring (421 CE), an exploration of a mythically celestial yet unrealistically ideal utopia shaped against the cruelty of social unrest and political instability during the Jin Dynasty. Throughout the work, the composer performs spoken excerpts from the poem in Cantonese, rendered as sung declamation. The visual media is composed of fixed videos that are controlled by the audio components, as well as live visual feedback that takes the live video from a phone, sending the live feed to a computer to process the visual effects. The audio components sing the poem in spoken words of Cantonese with pitch-bending tones / glide between quarter tones to create the illusive effects. The well-articulated exhaling and inhaling sounds, along with the pitch-bending, express the mixed feeling of bewilderment, astonishment, satisfaction, fear, and relief, and assist with the narration of the storytelling.

Ka Hei Cheng graduated with a Ph.D. in music (Experimental Music and Digital Media) from Louisiana State University, and studied at Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Bowling Green State University. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Cheng approaches a diversified culture and philosophy that extend her musical dimensions and nourishes a similarly diverse approach to her artworks by “brush strokes” with sonic palette.

Brian Lindgren
two tales from the shadows of the grid

In two tales from the shadows of the grid, sound is drawn from what digital systems are designed to ignore. Beneath ideals of precision, clarity, and binary certainty lies a residue of excess information, unstable traces, discarded errors, and quiet ambiguities. This piece listens toward those margins, treating what is usually filtered away as primary material and allowing it to surface as form, motion, and texture.

Brian Lindgren is a composer, researcher, violist, and instrument builder whose work explores the convergence of acoustic performance and digital synthesis through the EV, a hybrid string instrument integrating lutherie and embedded computing. His work has been performed by ensembles including HYPERCUBE, LINÜ, Popebama, and Tokyo Gen'on Project. He has performed with Alarm Will Sound and Wordless Music and has recorded for Tyondai Braxton (Warp) and RA the Rugged Man (Nature Sounds). Lindgren holds a bachelor’s degree in viola performance from the Eastman School of Music and a master of fine arts in sonic arts from Brooklyn College. Lindgren is pursuing a Ph.D. in music composition and computer technologies at the University of Virginia.

Derek Drudge
Topology

Something I find interesting about sound is that it doesn't cover anything; nothing can hide behind sound. You might not be able to clearly decipher a specific sound in an orchestra of noise, but the physical vibrations still exist. This is much different from a landscape, which is defined by the objects covering a visible area. Topology explores the nature of audio media using field recording, found sounds, prose, and waveforms. In this piece, I play with that relationship by using natural sounds collected outside, sounds mined from underground using a geophone, alert sounds from deep inside an old computer's library, and passages from The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan.

Derek Drudge is a composer and performer whose work explores sound, perspective, and gesture. His compositions range from acousmatic works for multichannel systems to pieces for open instrumentation and gesture-controlled electronics. As a performer, Drudge leads the band Pants for Panthers, which explores sonic movement, space, and improvisation.
— Derek Drudge

Yohta Kitagawa
Spoken Words

Spoken Words is an improvisational spatial audio performance that focuses on repetition in spoken words. The performer is limited to pronouncing the phrase “spoken words” and aims to generate a sonic experience for attendees by repeating the term. Audio captured by the speaker’s microphone is processed and modified in real time, including spatial configurations; however, the performer is always limited to the assigned repetition. This performance focuses on the connection between words from a perspective of sonic texture, rather than their meaning or phonetic aspects.

Yohta Kitagawa is a Japanese engineer and interdisciplinary artist, primarily creating real-time systems that bridge rigorous computer science and the fluidity of art. Originally attending Keio University, Yohta is currently studying abroad at Brown University, concentrating on computer science, design engineering, and sound art, while also conducting research with Rhode Island School of Design faculty.

Arun Chandra
Seven Poems by David Wolach

Seven Poems by David Wolach is a selection from his book, Occultations (2011). The voices were members of the Evergreen Experimental Music Ensemble.

Arun Chandra is a composer and conductor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

His compositions have been performed at many national and international conferences. Most recently, Chandra completed a commission from the Seattle Modern Orchestra (2026).

Zac Dulkin
How to tear yourself apart

It was only after I finished this piece that I took stock of the violence inherent in its creation. In effect, I spent months of my life crushing, distorting, lacerating, and shredding my own voice in every way imaginable. Admittedly, I did not intend from the start to write a piece about destroying myself, as this project began as an exploration of language and semantic perception. But as I heightened and heightened every new processing technique, each road led down the same maximally destructive path. For me, this piece is a confrontation of my personal discomfort with my voice, as well as a meditation on the unbearable lengths we might go to avoid saying anything at all.
— Zac Dulkin

Zac Dulkin is a master's student in music, science, and technology at Stanford University. Dulkin’s process is defined by radical personal experimentation: they approach every composition as an opportunity to break their current understandings of musical paradigms.

Jeremy Makkonen
Dalle de Verre

Dalle de Verre (from the French “glass slab”) takes its inspiration from the glassmaking practice of the same name in which shards of thick colored glass are arranged in various manners and set in epoxy resin. The resultant stained glass creates deeper colors as light passes through their windowpanes.

Similarly, I use thick fragments of sound — some shimmering in a way akin to light passing through a rose window, others fragmentations of broken up words that describe glasswork in various ways, and still more that are much harder to define but still relate to my efforts to portray sonic glass slabs.
— Jeremy Makkonen

Jeremy Makkonen is an Indiana-based composer and performer whose music explores elements of the mystical, the macabre, and the surreal to create an evocative and engaging musical language. Makkonen holds bachelor of music degrees in composition and flute performance from Michigan State University, as well as master of music degrees in composition, flute performance, and music theory. He is currently pursuing a doctor of music in composition at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Benjamin Shirey
I am the space...

I am the space… explores the impermanence of self and the transient nature of being through fragmented spoken text and sound. The voice inhabits the space between moments, thoughts, and emotions, revealing an emerging self that shifts through contradictions and pauses, questioning the essence of existence. As the piece unfolds, it leads to a quiet realization: “I’m here. I am the space.” The music mirrors this introspection, blending stillness and motion to create a contemplative field where listeners experience the subtle complexity of being.

Benjamin Shirey is a Texas-born composer and artist whose work spans experimental opera, film, and intermedia performance. He studied composition at the University of North Texas (UNT), where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in composition at UNT. His creative practice explores immersive systems, fictional anthropology, and world-building with a current focus on music in ritual and networked systems.

Steve Ashby
Mmabolela

Composed of field recordings from the Mmabolela Reserve in South Africa, Mmabolela develops the experience of a waterhole location at dusk among the savannah where creatures of all sizes congregate and move on once they’ve drunk from the precious life-giving source.

Steve Ashby is a musician, composer, and sound artist who creates works around sound found in the natural and digital world to discover places of intersection which engage in the art of listening. Ashby’s work is a combination of field recordings, manipulated sound, and composed elements. His approach focuses on the creation of multichannel sound works through the use of stochastic processes, data sonification, and interactive systems that explore sonic possibilities between environmental recordings and synthesized sound. The development of these processes amplifies the ever-changing experience of our environment to engage with the sensual nature of sound that connects us to place.

Stephen Ruppenthal and Gary Weisberg
Say the Word

Not for the innocent or delicate listener. The music starts out playfully, then shifts into a bone-chilling nightmare as robed, dispassionate scientists proceed to destroy our brains and souls. Slow, deep, processed voices come from the very depths of Hades, cascading and overlapping. Say the Word is relentless, allowing no hope of escape; a soundscape world of strange sonic dark matter colliding with a vintage voice from the mid-20^th century working out an audiology inquest. Much of the vocal material of Say the Word originated from an early 1950s “Phonetically Balanced Word Test” and accompanying “Familiar Sounds” recording created in Hollywood that was used in audiometer speech testing.

Stephen Ruppenthal is principal trumpet and contemporary music advisor for the Redwood Symphony (San Francisco, California). He studied electronic music and composition with Allen Strange at San José State University, as well as ethnomusicology with Lou Harrison, and holds a master of arts degree in contemporary musicology, writing the first comprehensive treatise in English of sound poetry, History of the Development and Techniques of Sound Poetry in the Twentieth Century in Western Cultures.

Composer, sound designer, and digital audio artist Gary R. Weisberg studied music, computer programming, and electronics at San Francisco State University, graduating with a degree in electronic music composition. He spent two years building a modular analog synthesizer and began composing electronic music and text-sound compositions for art and photography gallery openings. Since 1994, Weisberg has composed PC-based experimental electronic music, as well as pieces for electronic and acoustic instruments, occasionally performing with other composers and collaborating with visual artists.

David F. Green Jr. is an associate professor of literature and writing and associate chair of writing at Howard University. He has served as secretary of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and is currently the vice president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators. Green focuses on multisensory research that examines the role of memory and cultural storytelling, specifically the ways that music influences the interpretive and generative value of storytelling within the public and private sphere.

Chris DeLaurenti
Cocaine

Recorded on the streets of Seattle in 1999, cocaine is an ear-popping mosaic of words spoken amidst a lonely nocturnal soundscape: gritty tires, passing conversations, distant music, scraping footsteps, and airplanes bellowing across the sky. Armed with two microphones and a tiny card inscribed “cocaine,” folks read the card aloud while I taped the results. I sought the meaning and the melody of concentrated speech: What does saying “cocaine” evoke or elicit? As an early example of what is now called autoethnography, this seven-minute work was inspired by friends and fellow artists on phonography list, especially those who challenged what field recordings are and what field recordings can be.
— Chris DeLaurenti

Chris DeLaurenti makes sound works for installations, albums, live performances, and radio broadcasts. He teaches part-time at the Peabody Institute and works as a freelance composer, sound designer, and audio troubleshooter.

Peter Fedak
Long Distance

Peter Fedak and Vivian Ara Regueros worked together in fall 2025 to create an experiential version of the Regueros-composed poem, Long Distance, for her new book, Lumina. Now reimagined for seventh-order ambisonic playback to create an immersive experience in high-density loudspeaker array format, the work premieres at Cube Fest 2026.

Peter Fedak is a person of the aural arts: sound designer, composer, performing musician, immersive mix engineer, experience producer, and multimedia technologist. A New Yorker who studies at New York University and Juilliard, he has examined various facets of the creation, capture, and production of musical content in all types of delivery formats.

Vivian Ara Regueros is a multidisciplinary artist of Colombian origin, who has resided for the greatest part of her life in New York City. Her art comprises the realms of music, visual arts, and writing (poetry/lyrics). As an author, her bilingual poetry-visual art book, Lumina, was released in March 2026.

Lee Gilboa
There Were No Such Words in My World

How can we come to terms with our very being when it has no room in our language? “There were no such words in my world,” quoted from queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s 2021 book, Trans*, is a sentence that engages with and responds to these questions. The excerpt from which this quote is taken discusses Halberstam’s own upbringing as a transgender man and the inability to define what or who he was because no words in his world could capture his sense of self. Halberstam’s quote is placed in dialogue with author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s reading of Hurbineck, the little boy he met in Auschwitz, who spoke to all but was understood by none, and whose words became a secret language. The piece engages with those who have no room in language, the loneliness of the indescribable, and the walls that are formed by cultural, historical, and linguistic illegibility.

Lee Gilboa is a U.S.-based composer, scholar, and audio engineer. As a composer, she is focused on spatial audio and primarily uses pre-recorded speech, vocal processing, and audio spatialization techniques to engage with themes such as sonic identity, representation, collectivity, and self-expression. Gilboa completed a Ph.D. at Brown University’s Music and Multimedia Composition program and currently serves as an assistant professor of electronic production and design at Berklee College of Music.

Michael Schumacher
Andrews Variations

This eight-channel work unfolds as a slow-breathing drift between language and pure sound. Fragments with the contour of words — syllabic pulses, consonant-like ticks, and vowel-like smears — surface and recede, repeatedly pulled out of intelligibility and returned to it only in traces. The piece is based on a poem by Bruce Andrews, CIS-WORDS, with most of the sounds derived from a recording of Andrews’ reading. Andrews rejects the classical notion of poetry as the ‘direct treatment’ of things in language, arguing that the only thing that can be so treated is language itself.

Michael J. Schumacher is a Brooklyn-based composer who has worked at the intersection of spatialized sound and algorithmic composition since the late 1980s. He is best known for long-form, multichannel, generative “Room Pieces” presented in galleries, museums, concert halls, and domestic settings.

Anna Rubin
Shards of Sappho

Sappho, the Greek poet, lived around the time of Socrates and was regarded as one of the greatest poets by her peers and later critics. She was also reputed to have invented the Mixolydian scale and lyre. Despite how little of her work remains to us, she has been a source of much inspiration and speculation. Shards of Sappho is my second sonic meditation on her work. In this multichannel piece, I weave together some of my favorite Sappho fragments and commentary in both Greek and English, spoken by Classics scholar Lillian Doherty along with readers Laura Grothaus, Abigail Under, and Christina Martin.
— Anna Rubin

Anna Rubin’s music is propelled by her love of the speaking and singing voice, as well as environmental and political issues. She has composed for a variety of musical genres, including chamber, choral, wind, and orchestral ensembles. She also incorporates spoken word into electronic sound collages. Her electronic music has also accompanied stage, video, and dance.

Composing for Baroque and Korean instruments is one of her interests, as are various youth ensembles. Recent commissions include works for the Piano on the Rocks Festival, Sedona; and a commission from the German choral ensemble Kammerchor Westfalen.

Timothy McDunn
Be Still

The inspiration for this piece comes from Psalm 46:10, “He says, ‘Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations.’” This examines words that Christians believe to be imbued with unique power. In this psalm, we have the image of words spoken directly from the mouth of God, as he puts an end to all war and angst by the power of his speech alone.

Much of my work focuses on alternative tuning systems. Until recently, this work has mainly centered on just intonation, tuning systems based on the harmonic series. In this piece, however, I make use of higher-cardinality EDOs (Equal Divisions of the Octave). Within these tuning systems, I use scales that are transpositionally symmetrical, meaning that they map back onto themselves when transposed by a particular interval. By the end of the piece, the musical thought matures into a sort of lullaby for my precious, four-month-old daughter. In short, this is an eight-channel, maximally even, transpositionally symmetrical, 21-tone-equal-tempered concert lullaby for fixed media. You know, the kind most dads sing to their children.
— Timothy McDunn

Timothy McDunn is a composer and theorist who specializes in just intonation and electroacoustic composition. His music and research are regularly presented and performed at major peer-reviewed conferences and festivals, including the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States National Conference, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, the International Computer Music Conference, and others. McDunn currently teaches music theory and composition full-time at Wheaton College.

Sarah Naqvi
Walid

Walid features segments of comedian Kumail Nanjiani's set on Comedy Central's television series, This Is Not Happening. Nanjiani's spoken words are processed and manipulated to emphasize a transformative childhood memory. The composition's lighthearted yet solemn nature touches on themes surrounding self-worth, identity, and the desire to belong.

Sarah Naqvi is a flutist and electronic composer whose work embraces the intersections of contemporary and Eastern musical traditions, language, and performance. With a focus on cross-cultural practices, Naqvi draws from diverse lived experiences and unique personal stories to create expressive soundscapes. Aside from her musical endeavors, Naqvi is a research assistant at the Berklee Psychology of Music research lab.

Paulo C. Chagas
The Skin of the Earth: Fragments, for soprano, live electronics, and AI-driven visuals

The Skin of the Earth: Fragments explores the Earth’s surface as a living membrane — fragile, resonant, and constantly transforming. The work imagines the planet’s “skin” as a dynamic interface where breath, sound, memory, and technology converge. Live electronic processing captures and transforms the soprano’s voice in real time, generating evolving textures through layers of pitch-shifting, delay, and granular diffusion. The visual component is created through AI-generated imagery that is further shaped and animated in real time. The work unfolds in seven interconnected sections that trace a journey from breath and emergence to fragility and suspended resolution.

Paulo C. Chagas is an internationally recognized Brazilian-American composer and professor of composition at the University of California, Riverside. His work bridges artistic creation and critical inquiry in electroacoustic and audiovisual music, exploring the intersections of sound, space, technology, and philosophy. His compositions span orchestral, chamber, electroacoustic, immersive audiovisual, and telematic formats, with a catalogue of over 230 works presented at major international festivals and conferences.

Henrik von Coler
One Week

One Week is an acousmatic composition that integrates a staged reading in live performance. Drawing on an introspective autobiographical text, it reflects on emotional states and personal experiences during periods of transition and uncertainty. The spoken word is at the center of this composition, with an ambisonics mixing technique that creates a spatial image that resembles thought processes and inner monologues. The staged reading is performed live by musician and multimedia artist zl!ister (Orlando Kenny), who collaborated closely with the composer to refine the original text for performance. The performer remains seated, and the reading introduces a subtle dramaturgical layer, shaping pacing, presence, and audience attention.

Henrik von Coler is a musician and researcher, working at the intersection of art, science, and technology. In 2024 he founded the Lab for Interaction & Immersion (L42i) at Georgia Tech’s School of Music. Previously, he was the director of the Electronic Music Studio at TU Berlin and head of the Computer Music Team at the Audio Communication Group. He has performed and directed spatial music on immersive audio systems worldwide, introducing novel instruments, performance practices, and algorithms for spatial sound synthesis.

Performer zl!ster (Orlando Kenny) makes music to be felt — manifestations of the soul through the medium of rap, infused with touches of indie sounds. Z takes pride in building immersive album experiences that include shows, music videos, one-off events, and much more.

M.I. (Michael) Devine
Miracle Whip

Miracle Whip is poet and performer M.I. Devine's latest exploration of lyrics, music, and pop culture, this time bringing his witty and idiosyncratic approach to the 1990s hip-hop tradition. In collaboration with DJ Catalyst, Miracle Whip showcases Devine's trademark lyricism: cultural and personal history blur in surprising, often moving ways.

M.I. Devine is a songwriter, lyricist, poet, performer, award-winning author of Warhol's Mother's Pantry, and co-founder (with Julia "Ru" Devine) of the art pop project Famous Letter Writer. His work has appeared widely in many forms — essays, poems, video art, music, and more. Devine is a professor of English at SUNY Plattsburgh and lives in Blacksburg.

Brandi Davidson
Bushido's Code: What Are Swords Made Of?

Preface: I am a published poet, grateful to have been invited into this space through the generosity of a respected friend connected to this beautiful program. My work has lived primarily on the page and in intimate readings, so I approach this spoken word opportunity with humility and reverence for the performance craft.  

Bushido’s Code: What Are Swords Made Of? is an introspective meditation on discipline, restraint, and the architecture of sharpness. The poem moves between the invisible forging of thought and speech and the physical construction of a ceremonial blade. It lingers in feminine softness. It considers whether strength is born from silence, from endurance, from lived experience transmuted into wisdom. And then it pivots.

Brandi Davidson is a poet and writer exploring the intersections of love, mysticism, and self-awareness. Her work blends lyrical intimacy with esoteric reflection, favoring emotional precision and restraint over ornament. She is the founder of B&ROSE and the author of Daydreams About Night Things & Other Spells (April 2024), with Volume II forthcoming.

Summer Tate
Clash of Tools

Clash of Tools is a reflective poem exploring the challenge of measuring the worth and spirit of a people whose history and identity have been marginalized and constrained by dispossession. The piece contemplates the inadequacy of conventional tools and narratives to capture the depth of dreams, hope, and resilience, while envisioning a future defined by self-determination, cultural strength, and the enduring light of history and legacy.

Summer Tate has been writing and performing poetry for over 30 years. Her work has been widely published, and she previously served as the poetry editor for Woodhall Press. She teaches English in Hartford, Connecticut, and has also worked as an adjunct professor. Her work has been featured as part of a museum exhibit at the Maritime Museum. Summer holds a bachelor’s degree from Bay Path University, a masters degree from the University of Connecticut, and a master of fine arts from Fairfield University. She is currently a Ph.D. researcher in American and African American literature at Howard University.

Sam Wells
Seething Field: Imprint

Seething Field: Imprint is a turbulent interplay of memory and resonance, written for seventh-order ambisonics fixed media. The work unfolds through the filtering, modulation, distortion, and reverberation of a time-stretched recording of Jack Kerouac speaking. Using ambisonic impulse responses for the Chapel of the Four Chaplains, located in the basement of Temple Performing Arts Center, Seething Field: Imprint harnesses the Chapel’s reverberant and sonic characteristics, a space dedicated to four chaplains who sacrificed their lives on the USS Dorchester — a ship Kerouac once served on but was recalled from before its tragic sinking. The source material is a brief recording of Kerouac speaking the phrase “the Ocean,” time-stretched 512 times from about 1.5 seconds to over 10 minutes. The work’s title draws from the closing lines of Kerouac’s The Sea is My Brother, where “the sea stretched a seething field which grew darker as it merged with the lowering sky.” Seething Field mirrors this seascape, embodying the darkness, expansiveness, and tension of turbulent times, past and present.

Sam Wells is a musician and artist based in Philadelphia, whose work often invokes a heightened sense of the entanglements of space, air, breath, and body. As a composer, Wells creates acoustic, electroacoustic, and electronic works, often incorporating multimedia elements. His works have been performed throughout the United States and internationally. He holds degrees in both performance and composition from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, graduate degrees in trumpet performance and computer music composition from Indiana University, and a doctoral degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Wells is an assistant professor of instruction of music technology and composition at Temple University.

Redux (Mark Cetilia and Joe Cantrell)
Limitation of Liability

Limitation of Liability is an exploration of the porous boundaries between the human and the non-human, using the voice as a point of entry into a space of liminal humanity. This piece is a multichannel ambisonic recording of two audio practitioners as they enact a recitation using two distinct voices — one human, the other artificial. The two voices intertwine in a reading of the Limitation of Liability clause from the End User License Agreement for Apple’s Siri application, a technology that uses biological identification and imitation as its primary functional components.

A collaboration between Mark Cetilia and Joe Cantrell, Redux exists as an exercise in destruction and recombination. The duo examines existing technologies, breaks them down to their essential components, and reassembles them into new entities.

Mark Cetilia is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice exists at the nexus of analog and digital technologies. Exploring the possibilities of generative systems, Cetilia’s work is an exercise in carefully controlled chaos. Over the past two decades, he has worked to develop idiomatic performance systems utilizing custom hardware and software, manifesting in a rich tapestry of sound and image.  He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University.

Joe Cantrell is a sound artist specializing in installations, compositions, and performances inspired by the consequences of technological objects and practices. His work examines the incessant acceleration of technology and media production, its ownership, and the waste it produces. Cantrell has presented his research, art, and performances for audiences around the world, including the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the U.S., the International Computer Music Association, and the New Instruments for Musical Expression conference, as well as artist residencies in New York, London, Beijing, and Rotterdam.

Peter Otto
Luminiferous Aether

Students of scientific history will recognize that the title references a beautiful but abandoned concept in physics, eventually disproven in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. “Luminiferous Aether” was the postulated medium for the propagation of light “invoked to explain the ability of apparently wave-based light to propagate through empty space” (Wikipedia). LumAe envelopes listeners in harmonic constructs of a primarily static nature. However, beneath this static harmonic surface, individual pitch elements undergo continual spatial shifts through overlapping, nested, and granulated spatial matrices. In effect, harmonies are dynamically revoiced in space. The music is completely derived from bowed cello tones and harmonics (except for one note and one other sound).

Classically trained in performance and composition, Peter Otto completed graduate work at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 1984 and continued there on faculty for several years. His vita includes long associations with Morton Subotnick and Luciano Berio (Tempo Reale), and studies and collaborations with Mel Powell and Roger Reynolds. He held faculty appointments at University of California San Diego (UCSD) as music technology director and as founding director of the Sonic Arts R&D group at UCSD's Qualcomm Institute. Current work includes revising and conserving Subotnick’s ghost pieces for instruments and electronics for music publisher Schott and new creative work in his newly constructed auditory imaging studio/lab in San Diego.

Wei Yang
Rain contained, rain contains...

Rain contained, rain contains... is a fixed-media piece exploring the close relationship between everyday objects and nature. Made from sounds of bottles, tubes, and rain, it invites listeners to discover sonic connections and containment between the profound and the ordinary. While shaping the acoustic environment, the rain also consists of drops, each of which can be contained and has its own unique sonic profile. Through careful transformation and juxtaposition, the piece highlights the shared granular qualities of words and sentences spoken by the objects and the rain, allowing them to seamlessly transform into each other and blend the domestic and the natural.

Wei Yang is a composer/sound artist from China. He works with different media, through which he often contemplates the body’s role in sound production and sound in space, as well as the integration of various data from the performance environment (e.g., reverberation, light, etc.). Wei received a doctorate of musical arts from the University of Washington and is a Ph.D. candidate at the university’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media.

Shahrzad Talebi
Watch the Only Way Home Disappear

Watch the Only Way Home Disappear is an eight-channel fixed-media composition that uses scratching sounds on various found objects as source material to express the personal emotions experienced during its creation.

Shahrzad Talebi is a composer, sound artist, and educator from Tehran, Iran. Characterized by dense and complex textures, her music is focused on timbre as a means for exploring new soundscapes, color, time, space, and concepts. She holds a bachelor’s degree in composition from Tehran University of Art and a master of music degree from Bowling Green State University. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in composition at the University of North Texas as a teaching fellow, while exploring her interests in audiovisual and electronic music.

We are an interdisciplinary team of scholars and artists from Virginia Tech and Washington and Lee University, whose expertise spans English, computer music, theatre, history, and performance art. Led by Tyechia Thompson, the team includes Sherri Craig, Nneka Dennie, Brittney Harris, Eric Lyon, and Aline de Sousa Soares. Contributions from: Zoë Bowie, Renee Brown, Silas Moon Cassinelli, Beckett Craig, Victoria Ferguson, Brendan David-John, Moriah Joy, Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Jeff Mann, Roshmond SUM Patten, Munachiso (Muna) Obika, Chukwuebuka Okorie, James Pindell, Edward Polanco, Tawnya Pettiford Wates, and Cora Williams.

Brittney S. Harris, M.F.A., is an interdisciplinary artist and performance-based activist focused on creating immersive works that blend storytelling, collective activism, and community engagement to explore critical social narratives and personal identity. Her work has been featured at national theatre conferences and festivals, including the Southeastern Theatre Conference and the Black Theatre Network. Harris holds a masters of fine arts in acting, with an emphasis on cultural enrichment from the University of Georgia.

Enrique Mendoza Mejia
Inner outer self-variance and my deranged disembodied voices

Auditory hallucinations are the basis for this immersive 3D musical work. These are the most common types of hallucinations. They can be defined as the perception of sounds without an external acoustic source. Sometimes, the person experiencing them can lead a relatively everyday life. At other times, auditory hallucinations can significantly disrupt everyday life. The work aims to provide the audience with the experience of individuals suffering from auditory hallucinations.

Born in Mexico City and based in Vienna, Enrique Mendoza is an artist focusing on electroacoustic composition, live electronics, and hybrid live diffusion using ambisonics, binaural, and discrete system techniques. His electroacoustic compositions and performances use analogue synthesizers, custom software, 3D immersive audio technology, and multichannel systems. Mendoza has received commissions, awards, and grants from institutions and ensembles in Europe, the U.S., Asia, South America, and Mexico. Since 2019, he has been a professor at the National School of Cinematographic Arts, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in Mexico City.

Varun Kishore
Kraken

Kraken is an exploration of thalassophobia-as-sublime, realized through recorded manipulations of unplugged electric guitar with modular synthesizer, glitchy polyrhythms, and musical gestures reminiscent of extreme metal music. Small gestures are stretched, expanded, and combined with oppressive low frequencies to convey the sense of depth, pressure, and darkness associated with the deep ocean.

Varun Kishore is a guitarist and composer from Kolkata, India. His work explores interdisciplinary approaches to music technology, literature, and the audiovisual, with a focus on designing frameworks for composition and improvisation to investigate what he sees as the “apocalyptic” nature of creative practice. Kishore is a graduate of the University of West London (bachelor of music degree in popular music performance, 2012) and Goldsmiths, University of London (master of music degree in creative practice, 2019). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Composition & Computer Technologies program at the University of Virginia.

Sanjay Majumder
Phrygian Orbit

Phrygian Orbit is an acousmatic composition that explores the emergence of musical form through layered spectral interactions, algorithmic transformations, and spatial motion. The work is constructed entirely through computer-assisted processes, where fragments of harmonic, melodic, and textural material are continuously recombined and reshaped in real time. Ultimately, the piece invites the listener to experience sound as a living system — an interconnected network of resonances unfolding across time and space.

Sanjay Majumder is an experimental sound artist and composer whose work bridges technology, music, and immersive auditory experiences. With a background in acoustics, music technology, and computer science, he creates compositions that blend algorithmic sound design, generative processes, and spatial audio techniques, crafting multidimensional sonic environments that invite listeners to engage deeply with sound. His practice spans software-based music creation and research-driven audio experimentation. Central to his work is the exploration of innovative ways to manipulate sound using advanced digital tools, including real-time synthesis, convolution, and machine learning algorithms.

Wan Heo
Sacred Mountain II

Sacred Mountain II is my first attempt to create an immersive soundscape using my field recordings from my dissertation project, for which I traveled to Buddhist mountain monasteries in South Korea that are UNESCO cultural heritage sites, and captured their incredible soundscapes. One of my favorite recordings from the mountain monasteries is monks’ chanting in one of their daily religious services that happens at 4:00 a.m. each day. I was fortunate enough to record approximately 100 of them singing and praying during the services back in summer and winter 2025 at Tongdosa Temple, which recently became one of the critical inspiration/materials for my composition.
— Wan Heo

Wan Heo is a Korean-born composer based in Chicago. Her works have been performed internationally in South Korea, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Spain, and throughout the United States. Her percussion solo, Unveiled Future, is published by Alfonce Production. Wan’s music has been commissioned and featured by Darmstädter Ferienkurse, il SUONO Contemporary Music Week, SEAMUS, Yarn/Wire, Unheard-of Ensemble, line upon line, New Music on the Point, highSCORE Festival, and the Valencia International Performance Academy (VIPA), among others. Her doctoral dissertation explores the vulnerability of South Korea’s sonic environments through field recordings made at Buddhist mountain monasteries. Wan is a visiting assistant professor at Wake Forest University. She holds a bachelor of music degree in Composition from Ewha Womans University and a master of music degree in composition from Florida State University. She is currently ABD in the Ph.D. program in composition and music technology at Northwestern University, where she works under the guidance of Alex Mincek, Stephan Moore, and Jay Alan Yim.

David Z. Durant
Vessel of Voices

Vessel of Voices for fixed audio (2026) is a five-minute, 16-second work composed for the Cube at Virginia Tech. I envisioned a large vessel into which voices are thrown and shaken vigorously. Over the course of my career as a composer, I have collected many vocal samples, and in this piece I used as many as possible that remained from previous projects. Alongside the voices, I incorporated samples of a bowl being struck and manipulated in various ways. The piece was mixed in seventh-order ambisonics using Reaper.

David Z. Durant is professor of music at the University of South Alabama, where he is the director of the Music Theory and Technology program. Durant received Bachelor of Music and Masters of Music degrees from the University of Florida and a DMA from the University of Alabama. Durant has composed over 150 pieces, which have been performed throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.

Woohun Joo
Two Texts/Two Voices

Two Texts/Two Voices is a real-time sound performance that explores whether general audiences can distinguish between human-written and AI-generated texts through sound. Using sonification and carefully tuned spatialization of sound, this project transforms both texts into immersive sonification experiences. Rather than simply reading the texts, audiences are invited to listen to authorship. The work creates a sensorial comparative art experience by balancing information design — revealing stylistic signals embedded in written language — with poetic listening, shaped through timbre, sound effects, and spatialization techniques.  

Woohun Joo, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of digital arts and design at the School of Visual Arts at Penn State. As an audiovisual artist, sound designer, visual designer, and researcher in sonification — the process of creating sound from abstract visual art and data — his projects primarily explore the transfer of minimalistic visual art into auditory domains. He also investigates methods to visualize his sound-making processes in reverse and seamlessly integrate sonification with visual narratives.

Joo majored in visual communication design at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, Korea. He worked professionally as a graphic designer in web, printing, product design (UI/UX), identity, and typeface design. He received a master’s degree in Digital+Media at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Afterward, he completed a Ph.D. in human-centered design at Virginia Tech.

Mahbod Shirvani
Palimpsest Frames

Palimpsest Frames is a fixed-media work built entirely from two sound sources: human voice and tar (a long-necked string lute originating from Iran, popular in Persian and Azerbaijani music). Both are treated as fragile documents. They carry identity, accent, breath, touch, and cultural memory, but they are also easy to distort, overwrite, and misremember. The title points to palimpsest: a surface repeatedly written on, erased, and rewritten, where earlier layers never fully disappear. “Frames” refers to memory as something captured, cropped, and re-presented, like stills from an archive or fragments from a reel. The piece treats sound as layered records — each new version partially hides the previous one, while still letting it bleed through as residue.

Mahbod Shirvani is an Iranian multimedia composer and tar player based in the United States. He holds a bachelor of music in Persian music performance from the University of Tehran and a master of music in composition from the University of Missouri and is currently pursuing a DMA in composition at the Ohio State University. In Iran, Shirvani has worked extensively as a performer, composer, and creator of music for theatre and film. He has released works and albums, participated in international festivals, and collaborated with various ensembles and orchestras, including Alarm Will Sound and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul’s debut album, landed in 1989, straight from Long Island (or possibly Mars, according to early conceptions of the record). Created by Posdnuos, Trugoy the Dove, and Pasemaster Mase in collaboration with producer Prince Paul, and firmly ensconced within the powerful and rapidly evolving musical hip-hop culture of the late 1980s, 3 Feet High and Rising instantiates the potentials of sampling, storytelling, and rapping with no sense of limits. Whether broadcasting from Mars, complaining about potholes, or reinventing the 1970s children’s song Three Is a Magic Number (complete with samples from Johnny Cash and Fiorello LaGuardia), the thematic richness and creative use of sampling is simply breathtaking and remains fresh as a daisy (“Da Inner Sound Y’all”) to modern ears. De La Soul and Prince Paul’s wild and visionary 1989 record was a harbinger of future network cultures, and its conception of the total availability of anything that can be sampled remains ahead of its time in 2026. The artistic triumph of the record is that with all its manifold innovations, it is incredibly fun to listen to — a testament to the ambition, talent, and playfulness of its creators.

Eric Lyon is a composer and audio researcher. His audio software includes FFTease and LyonPotpourri. He has written two books, Designing Audio Objects for Max/MSP and Pd and Automated Sound Design. Lyon architected both the Spatial Music Workshop and Cube Fest at Virginia Tech to support the work of other artists working with high-density loudspeaker arrays (HDLAs). Lyon initiated the Spatial Audio Tidepool to provide technical instruction for creative uses of HDLAs. His work has been recognized with a ZKM Giga-Hertz Award, MUSLAB Award, by the League ISCM World Music Days competition, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Lyon teaches at Virginia Tech.