Ben Sutherland is a composer, music technologist, performer, and educator whose work and interests span a multitude of media and genres, including classical, popular, and experimental. His contemporary classical works have been performed by renowned ensembles including the Pacifica String Quartet, the Contemporary Chamber Players, and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble.
His compositional, research, and performance interests find a nexus in his work with interactive computer music systems, and in particular, systems of musical gesture acquisition, analysis, and processing. He has presented at conferences including New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), the Porto International Conference on Musical Gesture as Creative Interface, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), and the Symposium of Laptop Ensembles and Orchestras (SLEO), and he is one half of the interactive computer music duo, “The Machine is Neither…,” with Emma Hospelhorn.
Alongside these endeavors, Ben has also been involved with numerous projects in popular, “underground,” and cross-cultural genres, maintaining connections to his “musical roots” as a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, songwriter, and arranger. He holds a B.A. in Music from Oberlin College/ Conservatory and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of Chicago. Ben is currently the Chair of Audio Arts and Acoustics at Columbia College Chicago.