Musical recognition includes a Bourges International Electroacoustic Residency Prize, Prix Ars Electronica Mention, Pierre Schaeffer Mention, MacDowell Foundation Residency Award, NEA Award, Seattle Arts Commission Artist Awards, Jerome Foundation commissions, URCF NYU awards, and an ICMA commission.
I compose in acoustic and computer-driven media. Many of my mixed music (computer +traditional instrument(s)) works explore interactive digital sound processing in which the computer is responsive to the players’ idiosyncracies of timbre and tuning. These pieces are simultaneously instruments, compositions, and structures that allow delimited free responses and interplay between the computer performer, the computer, and the instrumentalist. I have composed some works for high density loudspeaker arrays up to 136 channels in which the spatial information becomes a qualitative transformation of musical and sonic articulative possibilities. Compositional interests include micro-timbre, texture, tuning, and, spatialization. My first sound installation (a site permanent one) opened in September 2019; titled RETU(R)NINGS, it sounds daily for 1 – 2 minutes in the Bobst Library Atrium precisely at sunset.
I value collaborative work, and have created new music with performers including Marilyn Nonken, Margaret Lancaster, Ivan Goff, Pauline Kim Harris, GlassFarm Ensemble, and Marianne Gythfeldt, Sarah Plum, Abbie Conant, Jane Rigler, Andy Kozar, and others. Current projects include new works for gamin, Azalea Twining, and for IKTUS percussion, and HyperCube.
Published theoretical work on electroacoustic and avant-garde musics addresses the significance of often indirectly perceived qualities in musics; point of view in abstract and representational electronic musics; spatialization as interpretive practice and ontologically; ethics of digital humanities’ archival practices; and musical embodiment and personal formalization in composition. Articles appear in The Computer Music Journal, Organized Sound, Array, and Perspectives of New Music.
My music appears on empreintes DIGITALes, NEUMA, Centaur, World-Edition, Capstone, Innova, Everglade, and New Focus labels. I teach in the Department of Music at NYU. Computer and electroacoustic music studies with Bülent Arel, Diane Thome, Richard Karpen, and John Rahn.
contact: elizabeth.hoffman@nyu.edu
Professor, NYU Music FAS
Co-director, Music FAS Sound Studios and Labs
24 Waverly Place, #268
NY, NY 10003
