A Shorter Bio for Performances and Related Events
can be found here.
Doug Van Nort is an experimental musician and sound artist/researcher whose work is dedicated to the creation of immersive and visceral sonic experiences, and to personal and collective creative expression through composition, free improvisation and generally electro-acoustic means of production. His instruments are custom-built systems that explore a sculptural approach to working with sound, and improvisation in partnership with machine processes. His source materials include any and all sounds discovered through attentive listening to the world.
Van Nort's work, presented internationally, has recently spanned telematic music, laptop ensemble compositions, multi-channel electroacoustic pieces, site-specific sonic installations, interactive textiles, improvising machine systems, music/interactive instrument design for dance based on muscle sound, and performing/sonifying live data streams from NASA's Kepler mission.
Van Nort often performs with his custom GREIS software designed for on-the-fly spectral and textural sound transformations and manual shaping of sound materials. He is a member of the trio Triple Point with Pauline Oliveros and Jonas Braasch, where his focus lies in improvised transformation of the sounds arising from his acoustic partners. As a dual to his work with GREIS, Van Nort has recently focused on designing and creating an intelligent system (named FILTER) for improvisation which autonomously listens and learns sonic structures, reacting to musical context and transforming the sounds of its given performance partner. His writing on Triple Point, GREIS and FILTER was acknowledged with the "best paper award" at the 2010 International Computer Music Conference.
Recordings of Van Nort's music can be found on Deep Listening, Pogus and Zeromoon among other experimental music labels, and his writing has recently appeared in Organised Sound, the Leonardo Music Journal, Kybernetes and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. He has performed at venues ranging from the [sat] and Casa del Popolo in Montreal, on WNUR in Chicago, Casa da Musica in Porto, Betong in Oslo, The Red Room in Baltimore, The Guelph Jazz Festival, Roulette, Harvestworks, the Flea theatre, the New Museum, the Miller Theatre, Issue Project Room and the Stone in NYC, at Town Hall (NYC) on intonarumori as part of the Performa futurist biennial, and at EMPAC in Troy, NY. His compositional work has been featured in contexts as disparate as the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), the Zerospace festival, the NYC electroacoustic music festival and various other festivals and contexts in the U.S. and Europe. In addition to Triple Point with Oliveros and Braasch, Van Nort regularly collaborates as a member of the Composers Inside Electronics, in a duo with Al Margolis (aka If, Bwana) and in recent years with a wide array of artists such as Francisco López, Stuart Dempster, Chris Chafe, Kathy Kennedy, Ben Miller, Alessandra Eramo, Anne Bourne, Judy Dunaway, Katherine Liberovskaya, Carver Audain, Jefferson Pitcher, Jonathan Chen, and in Sarah Weaver-led ensembles alongside the likes of Gerry Hemingway, Mark Helias and Dave Taylor.
Van Nort holds a Ph.D. in Music Technology from McGill University, where he was a Tomlinson Fellow studying with Marcelo Wanderley, Philippe Depalle and Stephen McAdams, an M.F.A. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute including studies with Pauline Oliveros and Joel Chadabe, and an M.A. and B.A. in Pure Mathematics from the State University of New York (Potsdam) including studies in Electronic Composition with Paul Steinberg at the Crane School of Music. He is currently research associate and instructor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Recent C.V. [pdf]
