2025
Grant Awardee: Michael Boyd
Project: Susan Bergman Gurrentz ’56 Art Gallery at Chatham University Sound+ Installations
Chatham University’s Music Program and Art, Design, & Communication Department will present multiple sound and multimedia installations from the SEAMUS membership in its new Susan Bergman Gurrentz ’56 Art Gallery during the Fall 2026 semester. A call for proposals will be forthcoming. The exhibition(s) will include opening and closing receptions to maximize visibility and community engagement.
Grant Awardee: Tao Li
Project: Women Amplify the Voice of Electroacoustic music festival, the inaugural WAVE festival
The Women Amplify the Voice of Electroacoustic (EA) music (WAVE) festival aims to hold an annual concert series, taking place for the first time at the University of Oregon in May (Asian heritage month) 2026. Through an international call for score, the festival aims to program 20-30 electroacoustic and multimedia works of diverse format and style by women. As a key underrepresented group in this genre, this festival provides a unique opportunity and a central stage to showcase the creativity and brilliance of women’s contributions. The festival’s concerts will be made free to the public, including students, faculty, and local community members who will benefit from this WAVE of works by women artists.
Grant Awardee: Ralph Lewis
Project: Laptop Ensemble Communities/Community Laptop Ensemble
This grant supports a current research and community engagement project entitled Laptop Ensemble Communities/Community Laptop Ensembles. It funds recurring community laptop ensemble workshops at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, a co-sponsor of this project. This free to the public series will be presented as part of the offerings of All Score Urbana, a community engagement composition workshop series Lewis founded in 2016.
Grant Awardee: Spatial Audio Gathering
Project: SAG – Spatial Audio Gathering
Launched in 2024, SAG was established as a central hub for scholars, artists, enthusiasts, and practitioners in the field of spatial audio. The conference aims to foster communication and exchange between a wide-ranging audience, featuring contributions from both renowned academics and early-career researchers. As spatial audio gains momentum, SAG seeks to create a thriving environment for the circulation of ideas encompassing technical perspectives, artistic applications, aesthetic studies, and philosophical research.
Grant Awardee: Rachel Yee
Project: Sonic Costumes for Immersive Theme Park Storytelling: Developing Interactive Wearables to Enhance Performer, Audience, and Environment Interaction
This project explores the design of sonically interactive theme park costumes that not only enhance visual storytelling but also respond to performer movements to generate or manipulate sound. By combining resonant materials, such as beads or shells, with e-textiles, the project aims to create a wearable instrument that contributes to the narrative and immersive experience during live shows. The research will explore how sonic interaction can transform the performer-audience relationship by allowing guests and the environment to actively contribute to the music, creating a dynamic, participatory layer of storytelling that goes beyond the typical theme park costumes.
2024
Grant Awardee: Brad Decker
Project: 2025 Napoleon Electronic Media Festival
The SEAMUS CREATE grant provided funding for additional resources to help support the 2025 Napoleon Electronic Media Festival (NEMF2025), Eastern Illinois University, Charleston Illinois, on February 4, 2025. The grant allowed us to pay for a catered reception (food and beverage) for participants, between concerts. This satisfied the goals: to provide some financial support for those traveling to our festival, to provide an opportunity for conversation between students and artists, and to reinforce a sense of shared community and inclusion. – Brad Decker
Grant Awardee: Byungkyu Lee
Project: Anthesizer V
Anthesizer V blends art, science, and technology by transforming the movements of ants into a dynamic sound experience. This installation introduces 8-bit organic computing, where the natural activity of ants generates complex soundscapes using MaxMSP. – Byungkyu Lee
Grant Awardee: Greg Cerveny
Project: Sound Community Music Series | Electro-Acoustic Takeover
Greg Cerveny is organizing an inaugural electro-acoustic concert and workshop for the Sound Community Music Series in Midland, Michigan, in collaboration with Dr. Colin Wood and Dr. Joo Won Park. The event will feature a student workshop designed for beginning electronic music performers, followed by a concert showcasing introductory electroacoustic performances alongside seasoned practitioners. This project aims to spark interest in electronic music practices and establish regular programming of electronics-mediated works within the community.
Grant Awardee: Michael Gaspari
Project: Noise & Buttons
Noise and Buttons is a pioneering music education project that aims to make early music education more accessible for neurodivergent students by integrating sensory-friendly hardware and software interfaces. At the heart of Noise and Buttons is a sandbox-styled application featuring a user-friendly music engine controlled by four buttons. These buttons enable users to manipulate different musical elements, being tempo, rhythm, timbre, and harmony. – Michael Gaspari
2022
Grant Awardee: Ralph Lewis
“The purpose of my 2022 CREATE Grant application was to enable access to Travis Thatcher’s photon tricorders so they could be used during a grant-funded All Score Urbana project (All Score Urbana: Live and In-Person), which took place in Urbana, Illinois.
After receiving the photon tricorders, we used them in the three “All Score Urbana: Live and In-Person” community composition workshop sessions in Summer 2023. Participants explored them on-site, finding them to be intriguing opportunities to create electronic musical moments without screens. They were of particular interest to walk-in participants who found this to be an exciting first step and to improvisors who mixed them with their existing practice. Two of the teaching artists trombonist Peter Tijerina and cellist briar darling were inspired to include them in improvised works at the end of the sessions, shown in the video links below.
The tricorders remain functional and will be featured again in the next grant-funded program that All Score is presenting later this year, “All Score Music and Dance”, which will feature Tijerina and darling again, as well as composer/flutist Dr. Kerrith Livengood and dancer Jacob Mark Henss. This grant has provided All Score Urbana with a significant and ongoing resource that has helped us communicate about electronic music with Urbana residents and inspire their creativity.” – Ralph Lewis
Grant Awardee: Anna Elder
As a recipient of a SEAMUS Create Grant, soprano Anna Elder formed a collaboration between her duo ensemble, SydeBoob Duo and the composer Hannah Selin. SydeBoob Duo features Elder on soprano voice, autoharp, electronics and Sarah Steranka on flutes.
As part of the collaboration, Selin wrote the work Evil Trees for the duo, which was inspired by cell towers Hannah viewed on her commute along the highway. The piece was premiered in February of 2023 and recorded in 2024 for a release on Gold Bolus recordings. The work combined fixed media based on improvisations that the duo recorded with Hannah and their live playing; Elder’s soprano vocals and Steranka’s alto flute playing.
More about the record on which Evil Trees is featured can be found here: https://goldbolus.com/dreamjournal/
Grant Awardee: Kel Smith
Kel Smith’s winning 2022 Create Grant proposal was to research the praxes of sound artists who have disabilities. According to Smith, portions of this research were presented at the New Media Caucus “Future Bodies” conference in 2022 and his work was featured on the Quebec CKRL radio program “La Croche Oreille”.
In February 2024 he began a second edition to his book Digital Outcasts: Moving Technology Forward Without Leaving People Behind, originally published in 2013. The new edition will include a chapter on accessibility and culture, with the bulk of content to be pulled from the research he conducted. The book is scheduled for a 2026 publication date.
In 2023, his work We’re Drowning in Information, which was inspired by his research, was exhibited at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Gimpo-Si, South Korea. The work marries dysfluent language patterns with electroacoustic composition. The text was Eric McLuhan speaking about the impact of communication media on society, used by kind permission of The McLuhan Institute. The visuals were images of the sky representing eight historical forms of mechanical reproduction.