Hunter Brown, composer

Hunter Brown in performance playing a drum

Hunter Brown is a composer, music technologist, improviser, and percussionist based in Chicago, Illinois. His musical practice focuses on creating fluid musical spaces by enabling unpredictable, spontaneous, and idiosyncratic interactions between human performers and digital media. In particular, his music explores the aesthetics of digital failure, glitch, and sonic extremes within the contexts of electroacoustic music, free improvisation, and new media art. As a music technologist, Hunter’s research focuses on designing artificially intelligent computer music systems to be used within the context of human-machine free improvisation. Hunter has published peer reviewed articles about his practice-based research in the proceedings for the IEEE sponsored International Workshop on Multilayer Music Representation and Processing, and the proceedings for the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference.

Hunter’s music has been presented internationally at the following conferences and festivals: International Computer Music Conference, the IRCAM Manifeste, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, and New Interfaces for Musical Expression. In 2017, he was awarded the annual Allen Strange Composition Award at the SEAMUS National Convention. Hunter holds a Bachelor’s of Music in Percussion Performance and Technology in Music and the Related Arts (TIMARA) from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, a Masters of Arts in Digital Musics from Dartmouth College, and is currently studying towards a PhD in Music Composition at the University of Chicago.

Hunter Brown's Something Else! premiered with Fonema Consort on April 16, 2022. 

Program notes:

Drums resorting thru underwater fiber optic cables. In one ear, out the other. Vapid vibes.