Andrey Smirnov
Born 1956. Interdisciplinary artist, composer, performer, instrument builder, programmer, author, curator, educator. He is a founder and director of the Theremin Center at Moscow State Conservatory, member of Russian Association for Electroacoustic Music, member of Electronic Music Foundation Advisory Council, director and founder of Altermedium International Festival for Electroacoustic Music, Moscow, founder and artistic director of Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra.
Since 1976 he is conducting independent research and developments of electronic music techniques, gestural interfaces, hardware and software sensor technology with particular interest in non-linear methods of interpretation using custom hardware and software.
He is keeping almost unknown historical archives as well as unique collection of original historical electronic musical instruments, combining deep research into the history of music technology with extensive experience of interactive composition and performance.
He has conducted various workshops and master classes in the U.S., Europe and Russia, attended numerous festivals and conferences. He teaches various courses on history of electroacoustic music and multimedia, sound design and composition, new musical interfaces and sensor technology, introductory digital audio signal processing and sound synthesis, acoustics and psychoacoustics at the Theremin Center ( Moscow ), Moscow University for Psychology and Education, Pro Arte Institute (St.Petersburg).
Since 1993 he has won grants and sponsorship from IREX, Rockefeller Foundation, DAAD, Soros Foundation and Open Society Institute and produced conferences, concerts and festivals of electroacoustic music and multimedia in Moscow , Ekaterinburg, St.Petersburg, Kazan etc., including Actions/Interactions concert series, electroacoustic part of Alternativa New Music Festival and Moscow Autumn Festival, Altermedium Festival etc.
His is the author of interactive performances and installations. His compositions for computer-processed and computer-generated sound have been composed for a variety of media including theatre, radio-theatre and dance. Among his most recent works are the Sonograms for tape (1999), performances Sonochronotop (2000) and Brain Jazz for interactive brain-wave biofeedback system (2001), Laser Bugging for the laser monitoring system (2005), Vetro-Touchless (2005) and Windowpane Theremin Installation (2006), Correlations for two performers and t-sensor based interactive system (2006).
