In­ter­na­tio­nal Com­pu­ter Music Con­fe­rence (ICMC 2026)

Piece & Paper Session 

• MHL / Kammermusiksaal / ausgebuchte Veranstaltung
   
• James Andy Moorer: History of Computer Music from Mathews to »Man in the Mangroves« — Keynote 

The Piece & Paper Session will present three pieces that were accepted to ICMC 2026 as Paper and as Piece. The authors will present their pieces and papers alongside each other. 

• Linear A: Christopher Trapani
• Rituals of Forgetting and Remembering: Jocelyn Ho et al.
• 雨/Rain: Yuan Zhang and Xinran Zhang
  
   

Paper abstracts

• Christopher Trapani: »Linear A: A Composer’s Integrated Workspace«

  This paper explores the tools used in the composition of Linear A for Bohlen-Pierce clarinet and electronics (2021). The piece explores the many ways a single microtonal line can be manipulated: echoed, transposed, splintered, zig-zagged, chopped into bubbling snippets, and finally, realigned into a closing chorale. Microtonal features in the bach library, critical in both the planning and performance stages, are exploited to pivot between fingerings and the precise non-tempered Bohlen-Pierce tuning. A notation interface uses a system of markers to visualize canonic replies in the electronics. This information is in turn used to generate a master file for real time score following with Antescofo~. The result is a dynamic, flexible, self-contained environment that accommodates the peculiarities of the project.

• Jocelyn Ho, Margaret Schedel and Sofy Yuditskaya: »Magnetic Memory Rushnyk«

  In what ways can two separate but traditionally gendered types of memory—symbolic embroidered memory encoded in ritualistic textile objects and magnetically encoded memory in historic aeronautical computing—intersect to create a performative decoding instrument? This paper introduces Magnetic Memory Rushnyk, a woven score-instrument that synthesizes symbolic embroidered memory with hand-woven magnetic memory. The project investigates the convergence of ritual textile embroidery (historically used to carry social and generational meaning) with the ”core memory” techniques developed for early computing and aerospace contexts. By embedding magnetic elements into a traditional East Slavic rushnyk (ritual cloth), we create a single performative object where weaving serves as a material practice of memory-making. The installation is activated through a custom-built electromagnetic interface, allowing performers to ”read” the cloth through touch, gesture, and sound. This work extends the Women’s Labor artistic research project, moving from the sonification of domestic tools to the performative decoding of ritual objects, proposing a model of memory that is materially durable and physically traversable.

• Yuan Zhang and Xinran Zhang: »Hexagram-Based Semantic Composition: Discretizing Embedding Spaces into Symbolic Compositional States for Improvised Performance«

  Recent AI-assisted composition systems often emphasize sound generation and continuous parameter control, treating semantic embeddings as latent spaces for producing musical material. This paper proposes an alternative approach in which semantic computation supports compositional decision-making rather than sound generation. Building upon prior work on semantic-driven digital scores, we introduce a method that extracts semantic embeddings from a composer-defined corpus and intentionally reduces and discretizes the resulting continuous space into hexagram indices. These indices are interpreted as symbolic compositional states, not as predictors of musical content. Each state configures structural conditions — such as the balance between fixed and open score layers, performer agency, and degrees of stability and change — within which musical behavior may emerge. Hexagrams neither encode musical materials nor prescribe performer actions; instead, they function as compact interfaces for selecting and constraining compositional worlds. An artistic example demonstrates how this hexagram-based discretization supports interpretable, repeatable, and open-ended improvisational performance within a digital score framework. By combining semantic embedding reduction with a highly compressed symbolic system, this work reframes AI-assisted composition as a decision-oriented practice that assists composers in shaping musical worlds rather than automating sound production.

About the pieces & artists

• Christopher Trapani: Linear A

  This paper explores the tools used in the composition of Linear A for Bohlen-Pierce clarinet and electronics (2021). The piece explores the many ways a single microtonal line can be manipulated: echoed, transposed, splintered, zig-zagged, chopped into bubbling snippets, and finally, realigned into a closing chorale. Microtonal features in the bach library, critical in both the planning and performance stages, are exploited to pivot between fingerings and the precise non-tempered Bohlen-Pierce tuning. A notation interface uses a system of markers to visualize canonic replies in the electronics. This information is in turn used to generate a master file for real time score following with Antescofo~. The result is a dynamic, flexible, self-contained environment that accommodates the peculiarities of the project.

  Christopher Trapani earned a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard, then spent most of his twenties in London, Istanbul, and Paris, where he studied with Philippe Leroux and worked at IRCAM. At thirty he moved to New York City, earning a doctorate at Columbia in 2017. He is currently Assistant Professor of Electronic Music and Digital Media at Louisiana State University. Recent commissions have come from Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, and Radio France. His works have been heard at Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre, Wiener Konzerthaus, Ravenna Festival, and Wigmore Hall. Christopher is a Guggenheim Fellow (2019), winner of the Rome Prize (2016) and the Gaudeamus Prize (2007). Waterlines, his debut portrait CD, was released on New Focus Recordings in 2018, followed by Horizontal Drift in 2022 and Noise Uprising in 2024.
  Christopher splits his time between his hometown of New Orleans and his European base in Palermo, Sicily. For more information: www.christophertrapani.com

• Jocelyn Ho, Margaret Schedel and Sofy Yuditskaya: Rituals of Forgetting and Remembering

  Rituals of Forgetting and Remembering is a performance work for three interrelated instruments: the new Magnetically Memory Rushnyk, the EM Embroidery Hoop, the Embedded Iron, together with ritualistic found objects. Together, these instruments explore gestures of women’s domestic and ritual labour, activated as sound. The work responds to forms of labour that are historically taken for granted and structurally forgotten—embroidering, weaving, ironing, maintaining—labour that sustains life yet leaves little trace. The Rushnyk functions as a woven site of memory, carrying patterned inscription through embroidery and embedded magnetic structures. It is activated through performance rather than display.
  The EM Embroidery Hoop, developed in Housework Commons, operates as an electromagnetic sensing instrument. As performers move the hoop across the surface of the cloth, variations in proximity, speed, and pressure are translated into sound. It decodes signals that are invisible and inaudible through performance gesture. The Embedded Iron, likewise developed in earlier Women’s Labor works, extends this reading through acts of pressing, hovering, and traversal. Gestures associated with smoothing, care, and repetition—often understood as erasing traces—are refigured as acts that reveal and activate what is embedded in the cloth. Sound in Rituals of Forgetting and Remembering does not emerge through instantaneous access or clean retrieval. It unfolds through physical effort, friction, and sustained engagement. Memory is encountered as something that must be worked for: activated through the body, maintained through repetition, and made audible through care. By treating textile gestures as both labour and performance, the work reframes forgotten memory, rituals, and techne and their remembering as intertwined processes. The piece offers remembering not as representation, but as embodied practice—enacted through textiles, tools, and the persistence of women’s work across time.

  Ho, Schedel, and Yuditskaya form the core team for Women’s Labor, presenting work internationally at venues including the Smithsonian Museum (Washington, D.C.), Goethe Lounge (Sydney), and Governors Island (New York).

  Dr. Jocelyn Ho is an internationally acclaimed pianist, multidisciplinary artist, theorist, and composer whose work integrates embodied performance, multimedia technologies, and audience interaction to reimagine contemporary concert practices. She has published on embodied cognition, gesture, music and technology, and early recording analysis, and is a Lecturer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

  Dr. Margaret Schedel is an interdisciplinary researcher and Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, and Co-Director of the Human-Centered Computing group at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. Her work bridges sound art, AI, and human-centered applications, including machine learning in creative practice and neurorehabilitation.

  Dr. Sofy Yuditskaya is a site-specific media artist and educator working with sound, interactivity, code, and salvaged material. Her practice explores techno-occult ritual, participatory performance, and the entanglements of technology, petro-culture, and consciousness. She is research faculty at De Vinci Higher Education in Paris.

• Yuan Zhang and Xinran Zhang: 雨/Rain

  Rain / 雨 is a digital-score composition that explores how semantic meaning can be translated into performative musical states. The work begins with Chinese poetic fragments related to rain, which are processed through language embeddings and mapped onto hexagram-based structures. Rather than using AI to generate musical material directly, the system uses semantic computation to select symbolic states that shape the behaviour of the score. The resulting digital score presents six animated layers, corresponding to the six lines of a hexagram. These layers guide density, gesture, continuity, and interaction, while leaving space for performer agency. For this ICMC presentation, Rain is presented as one realization of the same digital score, whose identity lies not in fixed instrumentation, but in its semantic state, layered score behaviour, and shared field of listening. In this work, “rain” emerges not as a fixed image or sound effect, but as a field of resonance, accumulation, and transformation.

  Yuan Zhang is a faculty member in the Department of AI Music and Music Information Technology at the Central Conservatory of Music and holds a PhD in Electronic Music Composition. She is a core member of the Digital Score Laboratory, a collaboration with the European Research Council (ERC), and translated the Chinese edition of The Digital Score: Musicianship, Creativity and Innovation.
  Her work focuses on digital scores, semantic-driven composition, and performer-centered AI systems. She served as Conference Organising Chair for TENOR 2025 and edited the conference proceedings.

  Xinran Zhang is a faculty member in the Department of AI Music and Music Information Technology at the Central Conservatory of Music and holds doctoral degrees in engineering and the arts. His research focuses on music signal processing and language models. He has published over 20 papers in venues including ACL and IEEE, serves as a guest editor for IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, and was the global champion of Track A in the 2023 Sound Demixing Challenge. He edited the proceedings of SOMI 2023.

Konzert am Abend

• 20 Uhr / MHL / Großer Saal

The evening concert will present 7 computer music pieces that were accepted to ICMC as pieces:

• Dong Zhou: Found Violin x Aromantic Hobby
• Minho Kang: The Letter
• Ilia Viazov: Tidal Unit for Sonic Activities
• Olivier Jambois: Tokens & Strings: an improvisation between an electric guitarist and a local LLM
• Nicola Leonard Hein: Rhythmic Traces | Twisted Electronics
• Eric Lyon: Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!
• Jeff Kaiser: Improvising Machine #7325: Inside My Trumpet, Again

ICMC 2026

The International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) 2026 will take place in Hamburg, Germany, from May 10–16, 2026, bringing together composers, performers, researchers, and technologists from around the world to explore current practices and future directions in computer music and sound art. 

ICMC 2026 is a collaborative effort by four Hamburg-based universities: the Hamburg University of Music and Drama (HfMT Hamburg), the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW Hamburg), the Hamburg University of Technology (TU Hamburg), and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) – as well as their jointly founded ligeti center. Named in honor of the Hungarian composer and former HfMT student György Ligeti, the interdisciplinary center bridges the arts, science, technology, and health in innovative projects, workshops, and performances that foster discourse and participation. Thus, the ligeti center’s core missions have inspired this year’s ICMC theme: Innovation, Translation, Participation. 

The conference is primarily centered in the Harburg district, with events hosted at TU Hamburg, the ligeti center, and nearby cultural venues. Alongside a rich program of concerts, paper presentations, installations, workshops, and performances, ICMC HAMBURG 2026 revives the tradition of the Off-ICMC: a series of companion events designed for the broader public, engaging the local community in Harburg and the wider Hamburg metropolitan area

On May 15th ICMC2026 takes place at University of Music in Lübeck.