Martin Schmidt is a composer, sound artist, video artist, and one-half of the internationally acclaimed duo Matmos, which has made albums and/or shared the stage with Bjork, Robert Wilson, Terry Riley, Zeena Parkins, Dan Deacon, Sō Percussion, Marshall Allen, the Kronos Quartet, and many more. For 15 years he was a manager and faculty member of the New Genres Department at the San Francisco Art Institute all the while performing in 20 plus countries. He has been guest faculty at Stanford University, Yale University, California Institute of the Arts, was the Peter Ivers visiting scholar at Harvard University, a guest faculty member at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University, and is now teaching at the Peabody Institute.

Schmidt enjoys digital and analogue synthesis, using the recording studio as an instrument, playing percussion on unusual objects, and the piano. In his spare time he is president of The High Zero Foundation a 25 year old community organization that presents The High Zero Festival of Experimental Improvised Music and DIFFUSION Festival of Multichannel Electro Acoustic Music.