Alex Hofmann, PhD

Alex Hofmann, Dipl. Musikl., PhD

Senior Scientist – Department of Music Acoustics University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

Alex Hofmann is a researcher, sound artist and saxophone/live-electronics performer working with improvised and contemporary music. He investigates tools and methods to enhance expressiveness in music performance by advancing new sensor technologies and developing dedicated computer algorithms.

He works as a researcher at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. He had previously done research at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), taught at different institutions (e.g. Dept. of Musicology, Vienna University), worked as a Teaching Assistant at the TU Berlin (Audio Communication Group), and as a Sound Design Assistant at Native Instruments.

As an active member in the Csound (computer music language) community, he worked as a co-editor for the books “Csound Floss Manual” (Heintz et al., 2011), and “Ways Ahead – Proceedings of the First International Csound conference” (Heintz et al., 2013), which document Csound’s open-source software development towards real-time sound synthesis in the last 25 years.

In his Ph.D., Alex analyzed motor-actions in clarinet and saxophone performance using miniaturized sensor-technology and advanced signal processing methods. He presents artistic work and research results in concerts or spoken presentations as well as in workshops at venues such as the Akademie der Künste Berlin (DE), Berklee College of Music (Boston, US), BEK (Bergen Center for Electronic Arts, NO), ZKM (Karlsruhe, DE), RADIALSYSTEM V (Berlin, DE) and maintains active exchange with computer music communities such as the Linux Audio Community and NIME.

Research fields:

• analysis of wind instrument music performance
• live-electronics + New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME)
• improvisation and contemporary music
• machine listening
• acoustics, sound synthesis, sound design
• interactive music-systems

Research Publications & Talks

A list of publications can be found here.