SPLICE Festival VII 2026 Lectures 2
Friday March 6, 2026
4:00-5:30pm EDT
Classroom 180, Colby College
Smee Wong
From Score to Stage: Music as Choreographic Partner
This presentation explores the collaborative process between composer and choreographer in the creation of The Secret of a Dream, a string quartet written in dialogue with contemporary dance. I will discuss how movement and music influenced one another throughout the project, highlighting the roles of mood, narrative, and embodiment in developing a shared artistic language. The talk offers insight into how interdisciplinary collaboration can generate new expressive possibilities beyond either medium alone.
Holly Stanley
Hear Me: Musical adaptability through background noise
Pupillometry and eye-tracking technology measure pupil dilation and gaze movement through speech and music perception. In the Speech Perception and Cognition (SPAC) Lab at Temple University, we use eye-tracking technology to measure the difference in speech perception between musicians and nonmusicians. Musicians have demonstrated increased multisensory neuroplasticity which influences their listening effort during speech-in-noise and speech-in-speech, to the benefit of those who use music as a rehabilitative practice.
Lauren Hayes
Beyond Skill Acquisition: Improvisation, Interdisciplinarity, and Enactive Music Cognition
What can it mean to say that musical activity is embodied? Much has been written over the last decade and beyond on the subject of embodiment within musical scholarship. In this talk, I discuss how a combined enactive-ecological approach to music cognition provides a useful framework for understanding musical activity as fundamentally embodied, as well as imagining the creative possibilities that can be facilitated through technological mediation. I also examine whether practice-based research related to music, technology, and embodiment has fully grasped the social and political implications of such a turn to the body, as has been seen in other fields such as science and technology studies, and sociology.
Héloïse Garry
AI in Audiovisual Performance: From Creative Practice to Critical Inquiry
This talk explores emerging approaches to creative expression through the use of artificial intelligence in music and performance. Drawing on recent advances in AI technologies and generative models, it examines how artists can engage these tools not merely for automation but as collaborators in the creative process. The presentation situates AI within a broader critical inquiry: questioning authorship, agency, and the evolving relationship between human and machine expression.
Bios
Smee Wong is a Doctoral Lecturer at Lehman College. He is a 2024–2025 CUNY Career Success Fellow and serves as a senator on the CUNY University Faculty Senate.
A multifaceted musician and scholar, Smee received training at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he developed a distinctive voice that led to his invitation as a guest composer at the prestigious Beijing Modern Music Festival. His compositions—spanning chamber, orchestral, and jazz idioms—have been performed across China, Europe, Canada, and the United States and synthesize Eastern and Western musical traditions.
As a vocalist and improviser, Smee is noted for his lyrical phrasing, emotional depth, and adventurous timbral palette. He holds a Master’s degree in Vocal Jazz Performance from the University of Denver and a Ph.D. in Composition from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
His scholarly work includes publications in Art Review and the Journal of Xinghai Conservatory of Music, as well as an award-winning presentation at the China Music Review Society. His Chinese translation of Norman Lebrecht’s Who Killed Classical Music? underscores his commitment to global musical dialogue. His works are published by TUX People’s Music and Dulcamara Press.
Before joining Lehman, Smee taught at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and Umpqua Community College in Oregon. He is currently working on two book projects slated for release in 2026 and 2027.
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Holly Stanley is a undergraduate student at Temple University studying Music Technology and Music Perception. Her current research primarily focuses on how music influences speech perception and development. She creates biofeedback pieces, original recorded music, and classical vocal music performances.
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Lauren Sarah Hayes is a Scottish improviser, sound artist, and scholar who is recognised for her embodied approach to computer music. Her music is a mix of experimental pop/live electronics/techno/noise/free improvisation and has been described as "voracious" and "exhilarating". Her performances stretch, transform, and sculpt sound by manipulating, remixing, and bending voice, drum machines, analogue synths and self-built software live and physically. Her shows are highly gestural, exploring the ephemeral and fragile relationships between sounds, spaces, and audiences. Over nearly two decades, she has developed and honed her live electronics improvisation system, an instrument that allows her to playfully navigate between the realms of responsiveness and unpredictability in both her solo performances and numerous collaborations.
She has been commissioned by major festivals including the London Jazz Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with a live BBC Radio 3 broadcast as part of its 2017 International Showcase, and Sonica, for which she gave four sold-out performances inside Hamilton Mausoleum, Scotland, famous for once holding the longest echo of any man-made structure. She has performed extensively across Europe and the US, including at Moogfest, World New Music Days (USA selection 2024), and as part of her tenure with the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop at Kings Place, London. The Wire described her 2016 album MANIPULATION (pan y rosas discos) as “skittering melodies and clip-clopping rhythms suggesting a mischievous intelligence emerging from this web of wires”. Reviews of her acclaimed 2021 release Embrace (Superpang) called it "sensual and frenetic", "a kind of religious joy", and "profound talent breaking new grounds". Her music has been released on Superpang, Hard Return, Pan Y Rosas Discos, LOL Editions, Werra Foxma, Sunwarped, and Harmonic Ooze Records. She is currently Associate Professor of Sound Studies at Arizona State University and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Music, Technology & Education.
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Héloïse Garry is an artist working at the intersection of filmmaking, theater, and performance, exploring the aesthetics of totality across art forms. Her compositions reflect a deep interest in cross-cultural and linguistic experimentation, and sonic storytelling. Her work has been presented at ICMC, NIME, NYCEMF, ICAD, Audio Mostly, the Audio Engineering Society, and the Internet Archive. As a Yenching Scholar at Peking University, she researched the politics of independent Chinese cinema and the role of music in the films of Jia Zhangke. An artist-in-residence at Gray Area and the Mozilla Foundation in San Francisco, she has collaborated with IRCAM and the Columbia Computer Music Center, and explored the sonification of the universe under the mentorship of physicist Brian Greene. In September 2024, she joined Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), where she studies with Mark Applebaum, Paul DeMarinis, and Ge Wang. Héloïse holds bachelor’s degrees in Filmmaking, Economics, and Philosophy from Columbia University, Sciences Po, and Sorbonne University.
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