PRESIDENT
Elizabeth Hoffman
Statement
Thank you for considering my candidacy for SEAMUS leadership for the next two-year term. I have always appreciated the strong SEAMUS community as a more intimate one than could possibly exist on the international level. My goals as president would center on initiatives already part of SEAMUS’ evolving legacy: broadening the conversation amongst composers inhabiting very different walks and stages of professional life, from increasingly diverse backgrounds and disparate regions of the U.S. I will be proactive in prompting SEAMUS to host events that promote conversation about how and what we create, to how we listen and experience and share music, and how we celebrate the ephemeral of spatialized music and multi-media while attempting to preserve digital musics.
I would be excited to further galvanize the ongoing conversation in SEAMUS about musical style and the histories of electronic music and possibly undiscovered canons. ‘What if?’ is a phrase on my mind in this context of organization leadership. I am attentive to music’s role in overall quality of life, and in promoting events that are responsive to pressing social issues including climate change. I believe firmly in music’s power to enhance almost everyone’s quality of life, routinely, and would like to encourage more attention, through SEAMUS events, to the relationship of sound diffusion to lived-in and urban spaces. We are important stewards of sound in societal context, more so than are acoustic composers, because we have always been thinking about the inter-connectivity of space, event, and music. Finally, I am committed to intensifying diversity initiatives regarding SEAMUS’ membership and Conference participation.
Biography
Elizabeth Hoffman teaches in the school of Arts and Science at New York University, and has also taught at the Universities of Washington and Minnesota. She is co-director of the Waverly Labs which include two spaces for multi-channel sound presentation and more generally for research and composition of electro-acoustic sound and multi-media. Hoffman is interested in the potentials of music created through diverse methodologies and technologies, including coding, machine listening, algorithmic design, use of large data, and field recordings. She has a background in classical piano and is particularly drawn to timbre, tuning, and spatialization in immersive soundworlds. She is also a proponent of inter-disciplinary collaborations and of conversation across and beyond academia, particularly about gendered, and other identity distinct aspects of creating, conversing, and listening. Her music appears on empreintes DIGITALes, NEUMA, Centaur, World-Edition, Capstone, Innova, Everglade, Sono Luminus, and New Focus, and has been recognized by Bourges, Prix Ars, and Pierre Schaeffer, the Seattle Arts Commission, the ICMA, the Jerome Foundation, The MacDowell Foundation, and the NEA. A permanent algorithmic sound installation of hers (RETU(R)NINGS) plays daily at sunset in NYU’s Bobst Library Atrium since 2019.
MEMBER AT LARGE
Eli Fieldsteel
Statement
Having served as the SEAMUS Member-at-Large for the past six years, I am pleased to continue the work that this position entails, particularly the collaboration with adjudicators that helps ensure a smooth annual conference, and interactions with student awardees that foster the creation and performance of new electroacoustic compositions. I look forward to continuing to serve SEAMUS in this capacity, and extend my thanks to the membership for their support.
Biography
Eli Fieldsteel is a composer of electroacoustic music currently living in Urbana, Illinois, where he is Assistant Professor of Composition-Theory and Director of the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois. Eli’s music and research explores the intersection between music technology and contemporary performance practice, focusing on topics such as human-computer improvisation, interactivity, and sensor-driven music. Utilizing new technologies and real-time environments, his works are gestural, expressive, and richly detailed. As an active collaborator, he has worked closely with dancers, choreographers, lighting designers, engineers, architects, and video artists, resulting in a variety of unique and site-specific installations and performances. He is an active user of the SuperCollider programming language, and maintains a teaching presence online through a well-trafficked series of YouTube tutorials.
Josh Oxford
Statement
I’d like to help provide a fresh perspective to the group that is influenced by popular music and its electronic techniques.
Biography
Electronisist Josh Oxford, born in 1985, is a composer, arranger, and performer of myriad styles of music. He has performed throughout the world, especially in his native central New York, on piano, percussion, and Moog synthesizer. After suffering a debilitating car crash in 2010, Josh has devoted his energy to composing. His music can be heard on releases from Aaron Tindall, Frank Gabriel Campos, Tim Winfield, Lindsey Goodman, Yung-Ju Pan, and on the debut CD of his band, The OXtet. He holds two degrees from Ithaca College and a masters from Queens College, where he was awarded the ASCAP Foundation Louis Armstrong Scholarship. He is currently pursuing a doctorate at Arizona State University.
VP FOR MEMBERSHIP
Abby Aresty
Statement
I am excited about the prospect of serving the SEAMUS community as VP for Membership because I share SEAMUS’s strong commitment to supporting students, artists, and educators creating new electroacoustic music today. If elected, I would reach out to current and former members to develop a thorough understanding of what first draws individuals to join the SEAMUS community and what factors contribute to members’ subsequent decisions to renew or cancel their memberships. I would then report to the board on the outcomes of these discussions and/or surveys in order to identify best practices for membership recruitment and retention. I would also compile and share information about potential future resources that past and current membership would like to see developed for further consideration. Supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, and access are among my highest priorities as an educator, researcher, and creative practitioner, and this commitment would likewise inform my approach to this role. As VP for Membership, I would work with the Diversity Officer to develop a detailed understanding of the demographics of our current membership, research successful membership-focused DEI initiatives of organizations in related disciplines, and explore opportunities to develop and implement DEI-centered recruitment and retention strategies to continue to grow and support our community.
Biography
Dr. Abby Aresty is a sound artist, composer, and educator. Aresty’s site-specific installations have been featured in local and national news outlets; Paths II: The Music of Trees, a temporary installation in Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum, was featured in an interview with Melissa Block on NPR’s All Things Considered and was hailed as “otherworldly” and “sometimes eerie, sometimes transportingly lovely,” by the Seattle Times. Aresty has presented her research in the United States, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and virtually at conferences including ICMC, Balance/Unbalance, ISEA, Sonic Environments, NIME, NYCEMF, and ACM’s Interaction Design and Children conference. Recent collaborations have won awards such as NIME’s ‘Learn to Play, Play to Learn’ award and an honorary mention for the Pamela Z diversity award. Aresty has held fellowships at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, Grinnell College, and the Acoustic Ecology Lab at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts.
Aresty is currently Technical Director and Lecturer for Oberlin Conservatory’s Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA) Department, where she runs the Crafting Sound Lab (CSL). The CSL is an undergraduate research team devoted to applying hybrid technologies blending traditional crafts and contemporary tools to the development of mixed media installations and new interfaces for musical expression. The lab applies these tools to the development of community-based learning and research devoted to supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion across disciplines and contexts. Recent collaborations include the Crafting Technology, Crafting History Oral History Project, an archive of stories of women and non-binary artists working with hybrid technologies, and the Girls Electronic Arts Retreat (GEAR), a STEAM summer camp in music technology and crafting sound for 3rd-5th grade girls.