Nikhil Singh

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Music

Beyond research, I've been involved in music for a long time. As a composer, I've written works for traditional instrumentation, electronic media, and hybrid formats, drawing on both classical idioms and extended techniques. I've also worked as a producer and sound designer across electronic, dance, pop, and film/media scoring genres, and as audio engineer for projects ranging from rock albums to operas. As an undergraduate, I majored in Composition and Electronic Production & Design at the Berklee College of Music. I started out as a guitar player, but now mostly play piano, focusing mainly on jazz and improvisation.

Here are links to some of my Experimental Compositions (e.g. electroacoustic, contemporary classical) and more commerically-oriented Music Production (e.g. electronic, pop, dance).

Multimedia

I've also worked on a number of multimedia artistic projects, e.g.:

  • HUMANS (2023), an archive and audio collage composition about space exploration, featuring global voice contributions across over 60 languages. The piece was played during a livestream event directly from the international space station.
  • Comusica (2020), a collective musical work for MIT's 2020 virtual commencement. Features hundreds of contributions from the graduating class.
  • Traveling Microphones (2020), a method for generating auditory compositions of auditory concepts as they are observed across the world, organized by perceptual similarity (by treating it as a traveling salesman-esque problem in audio feature space). E.g. kitchens, horns, or music.
  • Kronospaces (2018), an audiovisual interface to explore the Kronos Quartet's recorded catalog (+ new explratory recordings), using audio analysis and corpus-based concatenative synthesis.
  • A Rose Out of Concrete(2018), a multidisciplinary dance project by Nona Hendryx, Hank Shocklee, Duane Lee Holland Jr., and Dr. Richard Boulanger. I worked on various aspects of the show's technology, co-leading a team of students.
  • The Sound of Dreaming (2017), a musical-technological-theatrical work starring Nona Hendryx. It has been presented twice, once at Moogfest in Durham, NC on May 19 2017, and three months later at Mass MoCA's Hunter Center as part of Nick Cave's Until in North Adams, MA on August 19, 2017. I co-designed many aspects of the show technology, co-produced much of the music, and performed in the show.
  • BMV Kidzapalooza (2017), an installation for Kidzapalooza (at Lolapalooza Chicago 2017). A generative music system with lightning and automatic multi-angle video to simulate festival performance experiences for children.