Stephan Moore

Short bio

Stephan Moore is a sound artist, designer, composer, improviser, programmer, engineer, teacher, and curator based in Chicago. His creative work manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvisational outbursts, sound installations, scores for collaborative performances, algorithmic compositions, interactive art, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. Much of his work is collaborative, most notably with sound artist Scott Smallwood in their duo Evidence and with choreographer Yanira Castro in the collective a canary torsi. He is the co-founder of the Chicago Laboratory for Electro-Acoustic Theater (CLEAT) at the Elastic Arts Foundation, which promotes and encourages the creation of multichannel audio works. He is also the president of Isobel Audio LLC, which builds and sells his Hemisphere loudspeakers. He was the music coordinator and touring sound engineer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (2004-10), and has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Anthony McCall, and Animal Collective, among many others. He is a Professor of Instruction in the Sound Arts and Industries program at Northwestern University.

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Extended bio

Stephan Moore works at the forefront of the experimental audio world as a sound artist, composer, improviser, curator, software programmer, theatrical sound designer, loudspeaker builder, live sound engineer, and teacher. His creative work manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvised solo and ensemble performances, site-specific sound installations, sound designs and scores for dance and theater, software for generating and processing audio signals, and multi-channel sound systems for unusual circumstances. He builds Hemisphere loudspeakers through his company, Isobel Audio, and works as a freelance designer of audio performance and installation software for artists and institutions alike. His creative and technical work has been presented continuously for more than two decades, across five continents.

His compositions, performances, and sound installations have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, EMPAC, Issue Project Room, the New Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Stone, the Smart Museum of Art, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, the Goodman Theatre, Elastic Arts, New York Live Arts, the Chocolate Factory, Abrons Art Center, the Invisible Dog Art Center, the WNDR Museum, the Hong Kong Arts Center, the Katonah Museum of Art, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, the Sundance Film Festival, the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference, the International Computer Music Conference, the Gilmore International Piano Festival, and Burning Man, along with university venues including Yale, Princeton, Wesleyan, Brown, Bucknell, and the University of Alberta.

As an improviser and musician, he has performed alongside Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, John Paul Jones, David Behrman, Keith Rowe, Takehisa Kosugi, Lee Ranaldo, Leila Bordreuil, Ikue Mori, Joan La Barbara, William Winant, Alex Waterman, Forbes Graham, Andy Hayleck, Nic Collins, Nick Collins, Mark Cetilia, Ed Osborn, longtime collaborator Scott Smallwood, Suzanne Thorpe, Michael Haleta, MV Carbon, Andrea Parkins, Zach Layton, Katherine Young, Troy Pohl, Curtis Bahn, David Linton, John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, Matt Rogalsky, Hanna Brock, KG Price, Mikel Rouse, Maria Chavez, Newton Armstrong, Shelley Burgon, Seth Cluett, Kenta Nagai, Peter Bussigel, Caroline Park, Tim Rovinelli, Larry Polansky, Jesse Stiles, Bonnie Jones, and Senem Pirler, and has collaborated in performance with video artists including Benton-C Bainbridge, Jonathan Lee Marcus, and Walter Wright.

His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from New Music USA, Meet the Composer's Commissioning Music/USA Grant, the American Music Center's Live Music for Dance Grant and Composer Assistance Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Enoch Foundation, HarvestWorks, EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Mary Flagler Charitable Trust, the Experimental Television Center, Bennington College, Wave Farm, BRIC Arts Center, Gibney Dance Center, Vermont Performance Lab, Cape Breton University, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Granoff Center for the Arts, including residencies through HarvestWorks' Artist in Residence program and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Swing Space. His work has been recognized with a Bessie Award (Outstanding Production and Outstanding Sound Design/Composition, for a canary torsi's Last Audience), “Best Installation” at the 2018 New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference, a Juror's Choice Award at the Black Maria Film Festival and an Award of Distinction at the International Festival of Winter Cinema (both for Lines of Exile), a second Award of Distinction for Soft Red Winter, second place in the New Media category at the University Film & Video Association Conference (for FrameSwitch), and Northwestern's Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Professorship, a University Teaching Award. Eric Patrick's animated short film Meridian Transmissions, with Stephan's ambisonic sound design, has picked up more than a dozen “Best VR/360°” festival honors since its 2024 release.

Among his most significant ongoing collaborative relationships are the electronic duo Evidence with sound artist Scott Smallwood, an artistic partnership since 2001; a long-running collaboration with choreographer Yanira Castro and her company a canary torsi since 2005; a resident-artist relationship with the theater collective The Nerve Tank since 2008; the recording duo Treatments with multi-instrumentalist Michael Dauphinais; and, most recently, the improvising trio Attractive Nuisance with Bonnie Jones and Senem Pirler. Earlier ensembles and duos include Bumpr (with Peter Bussigel, Caroline Park, and Tim Rovinelli), Volume(n), the MEME Ensemble at Brown University (which he directed), The Music Committee (with David Behrman, John King, Takehisa Kosugi, Keith Rowe, and Christian Wolff), Xenolinguistics, the Steel Cello duo, Moore/Pohl, Floating Point, Esseness, KromoZone, Fluid Movement, and Little Big Bang. From 2012 to 2024 he served as Curator of Sound Art at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, planning and commissioning an annual exhibition of outdoor sound art; he is a co-founder of CLEAT (the Chicago Laboratory for Electro-Acoustic Theater), which produces monthly concerts of multichannel audio at Chicago's Elastic Arts; and from 2014 to 2016 he served as President of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology.

From 2004 to 2010, Moore was the Music Coordinator of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, working with and often performing alongside musical figures such as Gavin Bryars, John Paul Jones, Sigur Rós, Sonic Youth, Christian Wolff, David Behrman, and Takehisa Kosugi, engineering and facilitating realizations of their scores at venues worldwide, and overseeing performances of repertory works by John Cage, David Tudor, Brian Eno, and Radiohead.

Moore's career as an educator spans courses in sound design for games, film, and museums, digital musical instrument design, multichannel sound production, acoustic ecology, and interactive media programming. He joined Northwestern University in 2015, where he is now Professor of Instruction in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film and core faculty in the MA in Sound Arts and Industries program, which he served as Associate Director from 2022 to 2025. He has also taught at the Peabody Conservatory, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Massachusetts College of Art, Simon's Rock College of Bard, and the University of Chicago, and co-wrote a chapter of Thom Holmes's textbook Sound Art: Concepts and Practices (Routledge, 2022).

Stephan Moore was born on February 3, 1973, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised in Marquette, Michigan, on the southern coast of Lake Superior. He graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in 1991 and from Western Michigan University in 1996, where he studied music composition alongside creative writing, computer science, mathematics, and audio engineering. He earned his M.F.A. in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2003, studying with Pauline Oliveros, Curtis Bahn, and Neil Rolnick, and completed his Ph.D. in Computer Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown University in 2015, with a dissertation on the making of his installation Diacousticon. He lives in Chicago.