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Lei Lab – Liang Residency at Qualcomm Institute
University of California San Diego
Copyright 2023 – All Rights Reserved
Lei Liang served as Composer-in-Residence at the Qualcomm Institute (2013-2016) where his multimedia works preserve and reimagine cultural heritage through combining scientific research and advanced technology. He returned to the Institute as its first Research Artist-in-Residence in 2018. Lei Liang’s recent works address issues of sex trafficking across the US-Mexican border (Cuatro Corridos), America’s complex relationship with gun and violence (Inheritance), and environmental awareness through sonic explorations of the Arctic (Six Seasons).
Lei Liang is the winner of the Rome Prize, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto Xiaoxiang for saxophone and orchestra was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2015. His orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 2021.
Liang is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at UC San Diego. He authored and edited five books and over forty articles. There are 12 monographic CD albums dedicated to his music. His catalogue of more than a hundred works is published exclusively by Schott Music Corporation (New York). www.lei-liang.com
Emily Chin is a geologist who studies the Earth’s crust and how it has evolved over time. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she teaches courses in petrology and geologic history. Her research focuses on understanding the synergies between textures in rocks and how this relates to their chemical composition, and ultimately, how this all connects to the larger tectonic and geological story. In addition to geology, Emily has a passion for visual arts and enjoy illustrating nature and science.
Yeung-ping Chen serves as Associate Professor in Composition and Director of Academic Colloquia at South China Normal University School of Music. He has studied with Lei Liang, Clarence Mak, Law Wing-fai, and Christopher Coleman. In 2013 and 2014, Chen worked on the “China Sound Archive Project” directed by Lei Liang. As part of this project, over 250 hours of recordings of regional Chinese music were restored, digitized, and categorized. Chen now serves as Associate Professor in Composition and Director of Academic Colloquia at South China Normal University School of Music.
Joshua Jones has spent decades studying marine mammals and the ocean through underwater sound. At UC San Diego, Josh has developed international collaborative research to study effects of climate change and increasing human activities on Arctic marine mammals. He produced the interactive exhibit, Whales: Voices in the Sea, which has been installed in nine US public aquariums and co-developed the SeaTech program, partnering with Alaskan and Alaska Native youth to conduct community-based research on marine mammals. Josh has worked in all the world’s oceans and has been a wilderness fishing guide in Alaska since 1995. Josh is the scientific advisor to Liang’s Arctic project.
Falko Kuester received an MS degree in Mechanical Engineering and MS degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received a Ph.D. from UC Davis and currently is the Calit2 Professor for Visualization and Virtual Reality at UC San Diego. Prof. Kuester holds appointments as Professor in the Departments of Structural Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering (JSoE) and serves as the director of the DroneLab, the Calit2 Center of Graphics, Visualization and Virtual Reality (GRAVITY) and the Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI) at the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3). Collaborations with Lei Liang include Hearing Landscapes, Hearing Seascapes, Hearing Extremes projects.
Charles Deluga is a researcher, composer, installation artist, and systems designer exploring the translation of signals across sensory domains. His creative practice combines ecoacoustics, spatial audio, synthesis, and signal processing to produce immersive contexts for experiencing the intersection of nature and math. Charles has designed and produced A/V systems for architectural media installations across North America, including the Statue of Liberty Museum and MoMA PS1. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Music at UC San Diego after earning a master’s in Music Technology from NYU.
Keita Funakawa ‘s passion lies at the intersection of technology, media, and science. He graduated from UC San Diego with a B.S. in Management Science (Quantitative Economics) and a minor in Visual Arts Digital Media. He co-founded Nanome in 2015 and now leads company operations. Nanome enables expert scientists, students, and hobbyists to design and simulate molecules in Virtual Reality. Nanome is the next step in computational/medicinal chemistry, structural biology, and beyond. Find out more about Nanome at nanome.ai
Theocharis Papatrechas is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Qualcomm Institute. His research transgresses into environmental and data sciences, audio engineering, acoustics, and spatial audio. Deploying acoustic sensors and focusing on sonification of extreme events, he investigates the impacts of such events on the acoustic signature of underwater and remote terrestrial environments. Papatrechas has a Ph.D. in Music Composition from UC San Diego and has held appointments at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and CNMAT at UC Berkeley. His main contributions to Six Seasons include using audio software and design techniques to sculpt acoustic data. www.theocharis-papatrechas.com
Zachary Seldess is an inventor, creative coder, and musician whose creative and professional work covers a wide variety of audio-related topics, including new applications in microphone and speaker array beamforming, the design of tools and techniques for large-scale graphics-driven spatial sound, algorithms for efficient and generalizable psychoacoustic modeling, and many other projects loosely centered around enhanced audible expression. Zachary is the author of the MIAP software toolset (https://zacharyseldess.com/miap), which was used for multi-channel sound spatialization in several collaborations with Lei Liang, including Hearing Landscapes and Six Seasons.
Nicholas Solem is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Music at UC San Diego. His research focuses on training artificial neural networks to map psychoacoustical measurements to sound waveforms, which are then further harnessed in more elementary forms of synthesis, such as wavetable and granular. He holds a M.M. in Music Technology from New York University and a B.A. in Philosophy from the College of Wooster. In Six Seasons, Nicholas aided the team in sound design and post-production of Arctic sound materials to achieve pristine sonic results.
Samantha Stout studied Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University, subsequently earning a Ph.D. in the same discipline at the UC San Diego. At UCSD, Stout joined the Center of Interdisciplinary Science in Art, Architecture, and Archaeology (CISA3) to work with the center’s founder Prof. Maurizio Seracini. She carried out field research in Florence, Italy and collaborated with Lei Liang on the Hearing Landscapes project for non-invasive materials analysis using multispectral imaging and X-ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy of watercolor paintings. In 2023, she joined Atomica as a Materials Scientist and Metrology Engineer in Santa Barbara, CA
Greg Surges is a firmware & software engineer, computer music researcher, and composer. Currently Senior Firmware & DSP Engineer at Artiphon, he is a developer of innovative electronic musical instruments. Greg received his Ph.D. in Computer Music from UC San Diego, where he was a software developer and composer working with Lei Liang at Qualcomm Institute. Among the important software he developed for Hearing Landscapes include concatenation synthesis, and filtering through specific harmonic grids.
Gabriel Zalles Ballivian is an audio engineer working towards a Ph.D. in Computer Music at UC San Diego. He specializes in the field of immersive audio, specifically ambisonics. His research has been published in AES (Audio Engineering Society) and his music has been performed at the Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC) and New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF), among others. In Six Seasons, Gabriel designed a MAX/MSP patch which encodes each surround sound audio file into ambisonics, allowing the piece to be played back in any sound system using the IRCAM Spat Package.