I build tools to explore how music works

As a child, I was given a ZX Spectrum clone. I was amazed that one small machine could draw, calculate, run games, and even make music, however limited the sound was. Around the same time, I began learning piano and cello and discovered how much I enjoyed improvising and composing. For years, I followed that musical path meticulously and studied classical music almost exclusively.

The connection between those two worlds became clear only much later. What I have always enjoyed most is building a setup—musical, analytical, or technical—then trying it out and discovering an interaction I could not quite see before. Today that might mean turning a score into explorable data, translating a listening question into an experiment, or asking what a machine-learning model can—and cannot—understand about musical features. At heart, I do this work because I have fun doing it. Building accessible tools lets me share that experience with others.

Alongside research, I have spent much of my working life in the studio. As one half of Two Unknown Guys, I produced minimal and techdub tracks released on Ornithopter Records and Sinergy Networks. As part of Ornithopter’s founding team, I mastered the label’s catalogue, and later releases by bands and underground artists from Leipzig and Berlin.

For concerts and installations, I realised live electronics and stem mastering, most closely with Fabian Russ: premieres at Futurium Berlin, Montforthaus Feldkirch, and Scala Esslingen, several of them interdisciplinary productions with dance, theatre, and video.

Works, releases, and mastering credits →

I do not think access to music or musical analysis should depend on proprietary software or expensive hardware. Accessibility is a design requirement in my work: I release my tools as open source and keep their methods, assumptions, and workflows inspectable, reproducible, and adaptable.

Reproducibility also concerns the medium itself. I want people to be able to experience or study music with whatever is available: a sophisticated studio system, inexpensive headphones, a small loudspeaker, or even a visual or analytical representation. Music organises time; sound is one way of encountering that organisation, but not the only one.