Bio:

Akiko Hatakeyama is an award-winning composer/performer of electroacoustic music and intermedia. She explores the boundaries between written music, improvisation, electronics, real-time computer-based interactivity, and visual media. Storytelling, memories, and nature play an important role in Akiko’s work, and she most often finds beauty in simplicity. Akiko’s research focuses on realizing her ideas of relations between the body and mind into intermedia composition, often in conjunction with building customized instruments/interfaces. It is a form of nonverbal communication with her inner self and with the environment, including the audience. By somatically actuating perceptions with sound, light, and haptic objects, her ideas of relations between the body and mind become embraceable. Her exploration in embodying time – in the form of memories, emotions, and personal experiences – is realized. As a result, the exploration brings therapeutic effects. Sharing this special experience only achievable by creating and performing music is an important part of Akiko’s research and teaching. 

Her work has been performed internationally at various venues and festivals such as AWMAT, Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology, Bitforms Gallery, IAWM, ICMC, ISEA, ISMIR, ISSUE Project Room, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Musica Viva Festival, NIME, NYCEMF, SEAMUS, and Stanford University. Akiko obtained her B.A. in music from Mills College, M.A. in Experimental Music/Composition at Wesleyan University, where she studied with Alvin Lucier, and Ph.D. at Brown University. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Oregon.