Judges
Each year we invite international experts in music technology to judge the Guthman Competition. They spend time learning about our finalists' work, asking key questions about the designs, and sharing perspectives with the music technology community.
Some judges, like performance artist Laurie Anderson, jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, hip hop musician Young Guru, and Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess have used new technologies in performances and recordings to captivate audiences all over the world.
Others, like Technical Grammy Award Winner Roger Linn, synthesizer pioneer Tom Oberheim, and Cycling 74' Founder David Zicarelli have created new hardware and software that have changed the way we make music.
Many of our judges, like Stanford professor Ge Wang, McGill professor Marcelo Wanderley, and London University of the Arts reader Rebecca Fiebrink have conducted groundbreaking research that set the foundation for technical and design innovations in the music industry.
Gérard Assayag
Gérard Assayag has founded and currently heads the Music Representation Group at IRCAM research lab, and he also directed Ircam research from 2011 to 2017, overseeing research strategies at the national and international level and managing over 125 scientific and technical staff. He was instrumental in in the creation of international research institutions s.a. Sorbonne’s AI and Music Institutes, the French Music Informatics Association, the Journal and Society of Mathematics and Computation in Music, or the Sound and Music Computing International Conference. Interested in Machine Musicianship, i.e. the computational modeling of musical behavior from a spectrum of interdisciplinary views, Assayag has defined through numerous publications and successful technologies (OpenMusic, OMax, Somax & co) the concept of Symbolic Interaction to account for rich and versatile human/machine musical dialog, laying ground to the Cocreativity concept he fostered for next-generation interactive AI in the arts. Assayag holds the prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant, awarding his research career achievement and vision for the future through the project REACH (Raising Co-Creativity in Cyber-Human Musicianship). REACH features an international team over three continents and develops new theory and tools for Artificial Creative Intelligence in Music.
Vivek Maddala
Vivek Maddala is a 4-time Emmy®-winning composer, multi-instrumental performer, and music producer. He is a Sundance Institute Fellow for film scoring, and has had work premiere at the Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, and Sundance film festivals. His music defies categorization and has been described paradoxically as “the bleeding edge of hip” (Roger Ebert) and "timeless and universal" (NPR).
In addition to scoring films, Vivek has produced music for a number of rock, jazz, and world music album releases -- and his live performances collaborating with celebrated artists have enchanted audiences around the globe. As a performer, Vivek journeys fluidly through diverse musical styles, and effortlessly between many instruments -- including drums, piano, guitar, and bass. He has also served as a guest conductor with renowned orchestras and chamber groups, performing work he has written for ballets and films.
As a composer, Vivek has always sought to write music in the service of achieving social progress. His score for the Peabody Award-winning film “American Revolutionary” blends melodic chamber strings with expressive piano passages to frame the film's exploration of critical social movements seen through the lens of a revolutionary activist and philosopher. Vivek's brooding, passionate score for “Children of Memory” carefully fuses indigenous musical textures with his focused, yet sweeping compositional style to explore questions of how post-war societies can right the wrongs of the past. Accordingly, Vivek continues to seek out projects that lift the human spirit -- to challenge power structures and elucidate the human condition. His works, extraordinarily diverse in style, stand out among contemporary compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and profoundly compassionate nature.
Kerry Hagan
Kerry L. Hagan is a composer and researcher working in both acoustic and computer media. She was born in New Jersey and is a dual citizen of the US and Ireland. She has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a BFA in Music Composition with Conducting from Carnegie Mellon University. She received her MA and PhD in Music from the University of California, San Diego. She studied composition and computer music with Roger Reynolds, Chaya Czernowin, Brian Ferneyhough, Miller Puckette and F. Richard Moore. She has taught music at UCSD, UC Irvine, and the University of Limerick, Ireland.
Hagan develops real-time methods for spatialization and stochastic algorithms for musical practice. Her work endeavors to achieve aesthetic and philosophical aims while taking inspiration from mathematical and natural processes. In this way, each work combines art with science and technology from various domains. She performs regularly with Miller Puckette as the Higgs whatever, and with John Bowers in the Bowers-Hagan Duo. In 2022, the Higgs whatever and the Bowers-Hagan Duo joined forces as the HPB Trio at Piksel Festival in Bergen Norway. She has created works for the La Jolla Symphony with a Thomas Nee Commission, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (Ireland) as part of the CMC Composer Lab, and the Irish Chamber Choir as part of the CMC Choral Sketches.
As a researcher, Hagan’s interests include real-time algorithmic methods for music composition and sound synthesis, spatialization techniques for 3D sounds and electronic/electroacoustic musicology. Her music and research have been presented at SEAMUS, ICMC, SMC, EMS, and other conferences and festivals for electronic and computer music. She co-edited Between the Tracks: Musicians on Selected Electronic Music with Miller Puckette, published by MIT Press.
In 2010, Hagan led a group of practitioners to form the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association, where she served as President until 2015. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Composition-Theory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and President of the International Computer Music Association.