Faculty

Tom Lopez

Department Chair
Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts

Tom Lopez teaches at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music where he is Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts in the TIMARA Department (Technology in Music and Related Arts). He is also a Teaching Artist with Avivo, a community of artists dedicated to cultivating creativity through music. Tom has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund, the Betty Freeman Foundation, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, the Knight Foundation, the Disney Foundation, ASCAP, and Meet the Composer. He has appeared at festivals and conferences around the world as a guest lecturer and composer. Tom has been a resident artist at the Banff Centre, MacDowell Colony, Copland House, Blue Mountain Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Villa Montalvo, and Djerassi. His compositions have received critical acclaim and peer recognition including CD releases by Hanson Records, Innova, Centaur, Vox Novus, SCI, SEAMUS, and the Oberlin Label. Tom feels grateful to have studied with many influential composition teachers: Gary Nelson, Conrad Cummings, Morton Subotnick, Sal Martirano, Russell Pinkston, and Stephen Montague; and especially proud to have learned from a great many talented students. Read more about Tom Lopez.

Aurie Hsu

Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Associate Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts

With Nashville and Southern California roots, Aurie Hsu is a performer-composer who creates instrumental and electroacoustic music, interactive systems, and collaborates with musical robots.  Integrating music, movement, and technology. Themes in Aurie’s work include hybridized bodies between human and machines and “choreographing sound,” or incorporating the embodied experience of performance in composition.  Aurie performs with the Remote electroAcoustic Kinesthetic Sensing (RAKS) system, a wireless sensor interface for dance developed with composer Steven Kemper.  Her pieces have been presented at NIME, ICMC, MOCO, Art Basel Miami, SEAMUS, SIGCHI, Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, and internationally in Belgium, France, and The Netherlands.  Her research on gesture in sensor-based music, paradigms for mapping movement and timbre, and sonic-cyborg performance has been published in Leonardo Music Journal and in several volumes of conference proceedings including the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), the International Workshop on Movement and Computing (MOCO), Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology 16th Biennial Symposium, and the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC).  Hsu has received awards from the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology Commission and the International Computer Music Association (ICMA) and appears on Oberlin Records and as a pianist on Ravello Records.  Hsu holds degrees from the University of Virginia, Mills College, and Oberlin Conservatory, and is currently Associate Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts in Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA) at the Oberlin Conservatory.

Hunter Brown

Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts

Hunter Brown is a composer, music technologist, and improviser based in Chicago, Illinois. His musical practice focuses on creating fluid musical spaces by enabling unpredictable, spontaneous, and idiosyncratic interactions with digital media. In particular, his music explores the aesthetics of digital materiality, glitch, and sonic extremes within the contexts of electroacoustic music. Hunter holds a Bachelor’s of Music in Percussion Performance and Technology in Music and the Related Arts (TIMARA) from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, a Masters of Arts in Digital Musics from Dartmouth College, and is currently studying towards a PhD in Music Composition at the University of Chicago. Outside of academia, Hunter acts as technical director for Ensemble Dal Niente and runs the record label Party Perfect!!! alongside collaborator Dominic Coles. Read more about Hunter Brown.

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste

Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (b. 1984, Baton Rouge, LA), MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts from Brooklyn College. 

Select exhibitions include: “Set It Off,” ICA @ Virginia Commonwealth University and 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA (2021), “Devo (Listenin’ Out The Top Of Ya Head),” Berlin Atonal, Berlin, DE (2021), “Pendulum Music: An Arrangement for Four Performers and Geodisic Dome,” MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2018); “Club,” Performance Space New York, New York, NY (2018); “Evil Nigger: A Five Part Performance for Julius Eastman,” The Kitchen, Brooklyn, NY (2018); “Study Of ‘Study Of Three Heads’,” Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (2018); “Evil Nigger Part IV and Evil Nigger Part V,” Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, NY (2017); “Who Needs To Think When Your Feet Just Go+ Never Not Doing,” The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2016).

Select awards and residencies include: Camargo Foundation Core Program Fellow (2022), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Sound Artist-In-Residence (2021), Bessie Award for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design (2018); Issue Project Room Artist-in-Residence (2017); Jerome Foundation Airspace Residency at Abrons Arts Center, New York (2019); Rauschenberg Residency 381 (2019). He is also a founding member of the performance collective Wildcat!. Read more about Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste.

Christopher Poovey

Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts

Christopher Poovey is a composer, media artist, and creative coder who creates music and software which produce rich and colorful sound and encourages interactive structures. Christopher’s compositions have been performed by Ensemble Dal Niente, Ensemble Mise-en, University of North Texas’s Nova Ensemble, Indiana University’s New Music Ensemble, and Indiana University’s Brass Choir.  Chris was a finalist for the 2021 International Confederation of Electroacoustic Grand Prix and has received a special mention from the 2021 Ars Electronica Forum Wallis. His work has also been selected for performance at conferences such as the International Computer Music Conference, Seoul International Computer Music Festival, International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music General Assembly, New York Electronic Music Festival, Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States National Conference, Inner SoundScapes, National Student Electronic Music Event, Electronic Music Midwest, and Mox Sonic.

In addition to his work in composition, Christopher develops software for electronics music production and performance primarily in Max and CSound including the Grainflow package for Max, a plethora of Max for Live devices, and VST instrument build using the Cabbage framework. These tools and his compositions may be found at christopherpoovey.com. 

Abby Aresty

Technical Director and Lecturer

Abby Aresty is a composer and sound artist who uses technology to facilitate unexpected interactions between people, the built environment, and the natural world. Her projects are playful, meditative listening interventions that seek to provoke audience reflection on habitual listening practices in contemporary sonic environments.

Aresty’s site-specific installations have been featured in local and national news outlets; Paths II: The Music of Trees, a temporary installation in Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum, was featured in an interview with Melissa Block on NPR’s All Things Considered and was hailed as “otherworldly” and “sometimes eerie, sometimes transportingly lovely,” by the Seattle Times.

Aresty has presented her research in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong, in conferences including ICMC, Balance/Unbalance, ISEA, and Sonic Environments. She has held fellowships at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, Grinnell College, and the Acoustic Ecology Lab at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts and holds degrees in music composition from Eastman School of Music, the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington. Read more about Abby Aresty.

Andrew Tripp is director of Oberlin’s Recording Arts and Production program and director of Conservatory Audio Services.  He earned a bachelor of music from the Hartt School in music production and technology.

Tripp worked at Music@Menlo under Grammy Award-winning engineer and producer Da-Hong Seetoo, as a staff engineer at the Aspen Music Festival and School, and as a freelance engineer in Cincinnati. He has been a member of Oberlin Conservatory’s staff since 2015.