What Sings Where Light Ends (2026)

[Attention: Subwoofer or headphones with good bass response is required to hear many of these large marine animal sounds!]

In the ocean, light fades quickly. Sound travels far. For many marine animals, seeing is hearing. Listening is a way of finding food, avoiding danger, staying in contact, sensing distance, and knowing the world. This piece began with that idea, but the more I worked with marine bioacousticians, the more interested I became in something else: not only the sounds of the ocean, but the way scientists listen to them. In a big way, this piece is about listening, and learning to listen through the ears of a bioacoustics researcher. Scientists’ voices are woven into the musical fabric. There are special moments when they become performers, using their own voices to imitate the sounds they study: whale calls, tracing the shape of a seal trill, comparing blue whales to bass instruments, illustrating ice sounding like machinery. And through these imitations, their voices “animorph” into the actual sounds they approximate. The piece moves through biophony, geophony, anthrophony, and cacophony: animal sounds, earth sounds, human-made sounds, and the places where those categories begin to blur. After some ear training, the piece gels into a fragile underwater symphony. But the ending, like many compelling scientific questions, does not resolve into certainty. Instead, it returns to mystery. The more closely we listen, the more the ocean seems full of signals whose meanings exceed us.

Avian Chimæras (2015)

Avian Chimæras explores an enchanted forest of mechanical birds and other strange creatures. I was inspired by the Mocking bird's amazing ability to imitate other bird song and the Superb Lyrebird's gift at reproducing a remarkable variety of sounds; I thought it would be fascinating to imitate birdsong myself through the use of processes where mechanical and instrumental sounds could be aggregated in sophisticated ways to produce bird song. The natural syntax, vocabularies, patterns, and rhythms latent in birdsong gave me quite a rich palate to explore extra-musical qualities.

Solar Flare (2010)

This work is comprised of a single sample of my electric stove-top coil heating up and then cooling back down which is then used to drive spectral impulse responses of a kalimba and a temple gong. The harmonic reconstruction of the kalimba and temple gong evolves in complexity, pitch range, and density over the duration of the piece. To me, the work operates on several levels: aleatoric, surreal, and spectral.

Adjudicated Selection: SEAMUS Electroacoustic Miniatures 2010 Album

Persistence of Memory :: 2013

This work took one year to make, the longest I've spent with a single piece. It exists in a beautiful gray area between a 'hyper-real' ensemble performance and a surreal 'acousmatic' abstraction of these instruments. To me, it’s powerful, beautiful, and striking. It was a back and fourth collaborative process between Mark Hetzler (Trombone), Vincent Fuh (Piano), Nick Moran (Bass), and Todd Hammes (Percussion) performing traditionally notated material I composed, recording that, bringing the recordings to my desk for electroacoustic processing and re-composition in the studio, then sending these processed compositions back out to them to play over top of, sometime with notated music, sometimes improvised.

Newport Oregon: Stride Meets Tide (2026) - Hatfield Marine Science Center Residency

What do we “know” about a place only through sound? Can sound alone function to help us orient ourselves and navigate? Stride Meets Tide investigates navigation, place, and sound. Running through four regions of Newport Oregon at a relentless tempo of 156 BPM, I recorded my route with in-ear microphones and a second microphone focused on my footfalls, treating my footsteps as percussion and the changing landscape as an instrument. Asphalt, boardwalks, sand, gravel, bridges, cobble stones, traffic, birds, and machinery become acoustic landmarks along the way. What I was not expecting is the recordings to become important historical record of an iconic highly resonant bright-red grain silo in front of Rogue Brewery, a main-stay of Newport Oregon since the 1980s. The business has since closed and dismantled this remarkable sonic landmark, preserved in this recording. This composition condenses the 8-mile route into a 13min listening journey. Come join me on this sonic run!

Steel Golem (2011)

- n (in Jewish legend) an artificially created human being brought to life by supernatural means [from Yiddish goylem, formless thing]

   Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition.

International Competition World-Finalist: Sound In Space Competition. Harvard University + Goethe Institut, Boston, 2012

Adjudicated Selection: Music of SEAMUS 2011 Album

Jorneta Stream (2023)

Program note intentionally un-written