sonic arts @ CU offers an interdisciplinary, collaborative, technology-focused collection of faculty members, classes, labs and ensembles designed for students with overlapping professional and artistic interests in composition, performance, computer science, new media, music technology and sound art. sonic arts @ CU integrates students and faculty across campus, with emphases in composition and performance (College of Music), digital fabrication, physical computing, and software design (ATLAS Institute), and critical media studies (College of Media, Communication, and Information).

Labs:

BTU: The ATLAS Institute’s BTU lab is a hackerspace equipped with physical computing and digital fabrication hardware.

CRUNCH: The College of Music’s CRUNCH lab is a fully-featured electronic music project studio. It is optimized for computer music (including live interactive performance systems), as well as sound recording and editing projects and audio/video production.

Ensembles:

BLOrk: The Boulder Laptop Orchestra, founded and run by John Gunther and John Drumheller. BLOrk integrates technology with improvisers in an ensemble setting, providing live interaction between the two.

BISoN: The Boulder Image and Sound Network ensemble composes music, designs interfaces, and incorporates gestural control from the iPad’s various sensors and performs with iPads.

Performance Spaces and Series:

ATLAS Black Box: The ATLAS Institute’s Black Box Experimental Studio features digital technology for interdisciplinary performances that combine traditional and experimental media of all types, with work from students, faculty, and invited guest artists at the intersection of music, dance, visual art, theater, film, creative writing, new media, digital poetry, video production, digital cinema, and interactive audio and visual performances. The space is curated by the B2 Center for Media, Arts, and Performance (B2).

Pendulum Series: The College of Music’s Pendulum music series is the premier venue for new music on the CU campus. An annual concert devoted to new electronic music invites prestigious guest artists to collaborate with CU students.

Faculty

Matthew Bethancourt

Matthew Bethancourt

Teaching Associate Professor • Whaaat?! Lab • GAMES, EXPERIMENTAL SOUND
ATLAS Institute
Matthew Bethancourt develops experimental games and interactions that explore the limits of what a game can be and how games create opportunities for reflection. Much of his work invites people to do silly or mundane things, which points to deeper themes and often poses unanswered questions. In his work at the Whaaat!? Lab, Matt works closely with students to create and launch their own games. The Whaaat!? Festival, an annual...
matthew.bethancourt@colorado.edu
Photo of Betsey Biggs

Betsey Biggs

Assistant Professor
Critical Media Practices
Betsey Biggs is a composer and studio artist. Her work connects the dots between music, sound, visual art, place, storytelling, and technology, and has been described by The New Yorker as “psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears.” She collects scraps of sound and narrative fragments from around the world (as well as in my own collection of sonic memories), and deconstruct and arrange them in evocative...
August Black portrait

August Black

Faculty Director, B2 Center for Media, Arts & Performance • Assistant Professor, Critical Media Practices
College of Media Communication and Information
Assistant Professor August Black is a hybrid practitioner of art, design and engineering. He makes experimental spatial and acoustic situations, often by building his own technological artifacts and instruments in hardware and software. His past work focused on live networked audio, mixing FM radio with user input through online software. His current interests span the fields of the philosophy of technology, software studies, techno-politics, peer-to-peer networking and AI/machine learning. In...
augustblack@gmail.com
Arielle Dispenza in a black sweater

Arielle Dispenza

Teaching Assistant Professor • HCI, INTERACTION DESIGN, ART
Arielle Hein is a designer and technologist whose work explores the imaginative use of emerging technologies with a focus on user research, interfaces, and experience design. Drawing on an interdisciplinary background and a research-based creative practice, Arielle is curious about the human side of technology and how to build products and spaces that honor and enrich the social and physical experience. As an educator, Arielle is passionate about fostering out-of-the-box...
arielle@colorado.edu
Photo of John Drumheller

John Drumheller

Instructor
College of Music • Critical Media Practices
John Drumheller has teaching experience in the areas of composition, electronic music and music theory. His performance experience includes classical, jazz, and commercial music. Drumheller’s compositions have won several awards including the 1994 Quinto Maganini Award. His piece Five Landscapes was selected from over 100 compositions from around the country and was premiered by the Norwalk (CT) Symphony Orchestra.
John Gunther

John Gunther

Director, Thompson Jazz Studies Program • Associate Professor of Jazz Studies (Saxophones, Clarinet and Flute)
John Gunther is a composer and multi-instrumentalist playing Saxophones, Clarinet, and Flute. With a restless musical spirit, he enjoys exploring all forms of jazz from traditional to avant-garde as well as classical music, world music and experimental electronic music. His work with BLOrk has led to further collaboration with the STEM program at CU exploring informal science education through the arts.
Jiffer Harriman

Jeffrey (Jiffer) Harriman

Lecturer • NEW INSTRUMENTS FOR MUSICAL EXPRESSION, TANGIBLE INTERACTION, COMPUTATIONAL CREATIVITY
Jiffer Harriman‘s work explores new approaches for interacting with sound through building digital music instruments and musical robots. He started and runs the local artist community Boulder Experiments in Art and Technology (B.E.A.T.) which hold regular meetings to share and inspire new work. He creates and collaborates on interactive sound art that includes permanent installations in Boulder and Des Moines, as well as the mobile app, Wanderers, a geolocation based...
harrimj@colorado.edu
Photo of Tara Knight

Tara Knight

Associate Professor
Critical Media Practices
Tara Night is a filmmaker, animator and media designer for live performance. Two of her short films won 2014 Van Gogh Awards at the Amsterdam Film Festival in the categories of animation and world cinema. She is a founding member of Project Planetaria, an interdisciplinary project exploring the intersection of performance and astrophysics. The Floating World, a performance she co-created with Malashock Dance, won an Emmy in 2011.
Photo of Hugh Lobel

Hugh Lobel

Instructor
Hugh Lobel has composed music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, electronics, and instruments with electronics. Hugh has created commercial music and has collaborated on over a dozen works for dance and several film scores. In addition to his composing, Hugh is an active computer programmer and has lectured on his code at the SEAMUS 2011 conference at the University of Florida, at Colorado University, and the Faculdade de Engenharia...
David Schaal

David Schaal

Teaching Associate Professor • Sound Audio Frequency Lab • SOUND DESIGN • UNIVERSAL DESIGN
David Schaal is a teaching associate professor and lead multimedia instructor for the ATLAS Institute and has developed and taught Creative Technology and Design (CTD) courses, formerly Technology Arts & Media (TAM), since the institute's founding in 1998, and has the distinction of being the first ATLAS faculty hire. He is the director of the Sound Audio Frequency Lab and teaches the sound, interactive sound and sound lab courses for...
schaal@colorado.edu
Wayne Seltzer

Wayne Seltzer

Assistant Professor Adjunct • ELECTRONICS, DIY, U-FIXIT
ATLAS Institute
Wayne Seltzer is an ATLAS lecturer teaching electronics in the BTU Lab . He also teaches robotics engineering camps at CU Science Discovery . Wayne runs the Boulder U-Fix-It Clinic, where participants learn to repair broken appliances, toys and electronics with help from volunteer “fix-it” coaches. Prior to joining ATLAS, Wayne was a principal product manager at Oracle Corp., responsible for service automation technologies. He holds master's and bachelor's degrees...
wayne.seltzer@colorado.edu
Michael Theodore

Michael Theodore

Associate Professor of Composition • ART & TECHNOLOGY
Michael Theodore, associate professor of composition, is also a multimedia artist. His technology-informed work has been presented across the United States, and in Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Greece, Spain, Germany, Sweden, France, Australia, Japan and China. Michael created large-scale sound/art installations with roboticist Nikolaus Correll and touring pieces with performance artist Michelle Ellsworth. He is half of the electroacoustic “hardcore Americana” project, Batteries Die, with punk-folk artist Tim Eriksen. He...
michael.theodore@colorado.edu     303-735-1336