With an interdisciplinary career blending classical training in cello and composition, sound/audio data research, and innovative computational arts education, Margaret Anne Schedel transcends the boundaries of disparate fields to produce integrated work at the nexus of computation and the arts. She has a diverse creative output with works spanning the interactive multimedia opera The King Listens, virtual reality experiences, sound art, video game scores, and compositions for a wide variety of classical instruments or custom controllers with interactive audio and video processing. She is internationally recognized for the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media and won the 2019 Pamela Z Innovation Award from the New Interfaces for Musical Expression organization. Her solo CD, Signal through the Flames, will be released in 2022. She holds a certificate in Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and has studied composition with Mara Helmuth, Cort Lippe and McGregor Boyle and Geoffrey Wright and improvisation with George Lewis and Mark Applebaum.
Schedel is a joint author of Cambridge University Press’s Electronic Music and is working on a second book Believe by Making about embodied cognition and spatial computing. She recently edited an issue of Organised Sound on using electroacoustic terminology to describe pre-electric sound and her work has been supported by the Presser Foundation, Centro Mexicano para la Música y les Artes Sonoras, and Meet the Composer. She has been commissioned by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, Ictus, reACT, Yarn|Wire and the Unheard-of//Ensemble. Her research focuses on gesture in music, the sustainability of technology in art, and sonification of data; she co-authored a paper published in Frontiers of Neuroscience on using familiar music to sonify the gaits of people with Parkinson’s Disease. She serves as a regional editor for Organised Sound and served as an editor for the open-access journal Cogent Arts and Humanities. From 2009-2014 she helped run Devotion, a gallery in New York City focused on the intersection of art, science, new media, and design.
As an Associate Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, she taught SUNY’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for Coursera, and formerly served as the director of the Consortium for Digital Arts Culture and Technology. Schedel currently serves as the Chair of the Art Department and leads the Making Sense of Data Workgroup at the Institute of Advanced Computational Science. She also teaches computer music composition and co-directs the laptop orchestra at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. In her spare time, she curates exhibitions focusing on the intersection of art, science, new media, and sound while running www.arts.codes, a platform and artist collective celebrating art with computational underpinnings.