TEAM
Bernhard Gál (PI)
Austrian composer, sound artist, artistic researcher and musicologist Bernhard Gál is equally at home in the domains of contemporary music, installation art and media art. He has presented around 110 sound installations and intermedia art projects around the globe, as well as music for acoustic instruments and electro-acoustic music, and has worked with ensembles as well as musicians in the electronic and improvisation scene.
Gál teaches at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna and since 2006 has been artistic director of the transdisciplinary avant-garde festival shut up and listen! in Vienna. In 2021, he received a PhD from the University Mozarteum Salzburg with an inter-university dissertation about site-specific aspects of sound art. As head of the three-year FWF-PEEK project AUDIO GHOSTS, Gál is currently engaged in the artistic exploration of auditory illusions in sound art. His works have been awarded various prizes, presented internationally in concerts, exhibitions and installations, and documented with some 40 audio publications and two comprehensive catalogue books.
Veronika Mayer
As a sound installation artist, composer of electroacoustic and instrumental music as well as being active as a laptop musician in the context of free improvisation, Veronika Mayer is especially focused on exploring the use of live electronics in multichannel setups. In her working processes she reacts to sound-inherent properties developing form-giving structures from these. Minimal changes in sound and textures are characteristic of her works, creating the sensation of stretched time. A deepening aspect is the thematisation of listening and of the creative process itself – thus she demands in her music the willingness to listen as well as openness for subtle details. Veronika Mayer has received numerous commissions and performs internationally, including renowned festivals like Musikprotokoll, Wien Modern, music unlimited, Ars Electronica, Madrid International Festival of Contemporary Music COMA, CoCArt Music Festival Torun, Ostrava Days Festival, mise-en music Festival New York, a.o. She holds a permanent teaching position in the Computer Music and Sound Art programme at the IEM (Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, KUG) as well as in the master´s degree programme CAP (Contemporary Arts Practice, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna). Since 2020 she is one of the curators of the annual sound art festival Klangmanifeste in Vienna.
Piotr Majdak
After completing a technical school for electrical engineering, Piotr Majdak studied audio engineering at the University of Technology in Graz (TU-Graz) and at the University of Music and Dramatic Arts in Graz (KUG). During his studies, he developed hardware and software for measurement tools and process-controlling devices. Piotr Majdak graduated with the Master’s thesis entitled “Implementation of a head related binaural technique”, in which he dealt with a real-time binaural system called Ambisonics. In that project, Ambisonics allowed the inclusion of the listener’s head movements without the need for time-variant filtering, and therefore a reduction of the computational power. As part of the thesis, the binaural system was implemented for a digital signal processor platform including a head-tracker. The Master’s thesis was done jointly with Markus Noisternig. In 2002, he joined ARI as a junior researcher being involved in setting-up the group “Psychoacoustics and experimental audiology”. In 2008, he finished his PhD about sound lateralization in cochlear-implant listeners, in which the effects of different aspects of the interaural time differences on sound lateralization are described. In 2015, his habilitation for the area “Acoustics and audio engineering” was approved, which allows him to supervise PhD students at the KUG.
General research field is spatial hearing, in particular:
Sound localization in normal-hearing, hearing-impaired, and cochlear-implant listeners;
Virtual acoustics; Effects of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) and its numerical simulation; General binaural effects in electric hearing.
Florian Pausch
Florian Pausch completed the inter-university degree programme in Electrical Engineering-Audio Engineering at Graz University of Technology and the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. As part of his diploma thesis entitled “A Rigid Double Cone Microphone Array Prototype”, supervised by Hannes Pomberger and Franz Zotter, he developed a 64-channel microphone array for sound field analysis in a recording area restricted in the zenith angle by a rigid double cone. During his doctoral studies, Florian Pausch conducted interdisciplinary research in the fields of Acoustic Virtual Reality and Medical Acoustics at the Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics at RWTH Aachen University. His dissertation “Spatial audio reproduction for hearing aid research: System design, evaluation and application”, supervised by Janina Fels, deals with implementations of spatial audio reproduction systems for virtual acoustic environments that can be used for the evaluation of hearing aid algorithms and as a test and training environment for hearing aid users.
Current Research
Florian Pausch is part of the project SONICOM and works on parametric modeling of the pinna, and personalised headphone reproduction using machine learning algorithms.
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Further cooperation partners, advisory board members and other persons involved soon to be announced!