SPLICE Institute 2025 Participant Concert 2 Program
Friday June 27, 2025
7:30pm EDT
Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University
Sofía Matus Cancino : A Study in Decay
Anne La Berge, flute
Sheila Wang : Triple
SPLICE Ensemble
Yuxuan Lin : First Pulse
Robin Meiksins, flute
David Box : il mio vicino sentimentale
SPLICE Ensemble
Dean Kyle : phytosynthesis
Robin Meiksins, flute
Max Chung : Gestaltzerfall
SPLICE Ensemble
Kevin Mah : Reprisal Of A Liminal Space
Anne La Berge, flute
Zhishu Chang : Midnight Garden
SPLICE Ensemble
Dan Antoniu : Planes Beyond
Robin Meiksins, flute
Joey Latka : Selves
SPLICE Ensemble
Notes
Sofía Matus Cancino : A Study in Decay
Study in Decay will be an interactive audiovisual performance that explores the themes of time and disruption. Central to the work is the interaction between the performer and a responsive environment, where sound and visual elements decay based on the performer’s actions.
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Sheila Wang : Triple
This composition is structured around three primary musical gestures, which are interwoven and recontextualized throughout the piece. The creative approach is inspired by the philosophical concept of the rhizome, as proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Rather than following a linear or hierarchical development, the piece embraces a non-linear, multi-directional form, where ideas proliferate, intersect, and evolve in a network-like manner, reflecting the organic and dynamic nature of the rhizome.
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Yuxuan Lin : First Pulse
This work, titled First Pulse, draws inspirations from the act of giving birth — the very profound and primal process of bringing life into the world. Structured in a loose arc that references the dilation, expulsion, and placental stages of labor, the piece explores the emotional sensibilities of a mother in the act of becoming, tracing an inner landscape shaped by tension, vulnerability, and awe. The performer’s heartbeat is captured live and woven into the electronics, making each performance uniquely intimate and personal. At its core lies a celebration of the moment when a new heartbeat emerges, a “first pulse” that never existed before.
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David Box : il mio vicino sentimentale
il mio vicion sentimentale by David Lee Box is an electro-acoustic composition for the Splice Ensemble. The composition explores the relationship of neighbor tones, and chords in the form of three themes in a modified rounded form.
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Dean Kyle : phytosynthesis
phytosynthesis is a botanical duo exploring what happens when a musician shares a performative musical space with a plant. Like a human, a performing plant has quite the expressive potential as a subject of musical interaction and catalyst for sound; in turn, having a duo partner who is a plant likely affects the way that a human performs. The human musician engages in a range of methods to elicit the music contained within the plant, and with a bit of coaxing and electronic assistance, the plant's presence is sonified, played with, and lived within.
Max Chung : Gestaltzerfall
Gestaltzerfall refers to a psychological phenomenon where a complex shape or pattern is observed for a long time, and in that time the brain begins to break the image into simpler sections. This fragmentation leads to unfamiliarity with the object. In the same way, this piece takes a melody and focuses on tiny sections to repeat and modify, taking these moments and stretching them out through improvisatory sections. Rhythmically, the work switches between locking the instruments in a strict grid and falling apart into a nebulous cloud of sound, using the motifs from before and developing them. The melody is interjected with glitchy texture, mimicking the sound of freezing electronic systems.
The piece explores the idea of trying to hold the future within my control, as a familiar situation becomes increasingly confusing. The government in which this country has been put under is now alien as the name is the same, but it feels as though I and my friends are not necessarily safe. The instability of trying to find aspects the old structure is represented in the work with the constant back and forth of the piece, finally flatlining.
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Kevin Mah : Reprisal Of A Liminal Space
Exploring the uncanny transience of in-between spaces, Reprisal Of A Liminal Space is comprised of recorded sounds found in subways, crosswalks, hallways, and stairwells. These sounds are then mangled, rearranged and heavily modulated, with the goal to be as unrecognizable from the source as possible. Originally purely fixed media, this piece had its more energetic sounds stripped to then be incorporated into a series of granular synths built in Pure Data. These synths are used as audio-reactive elements to be triggered by a performer (in this case, the flute) using specific pitches and amplitudes. The stripped down fixed media track serves as an accompaniment.
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Zhishu Chang : Midnight Garden
Midnight Garden draws inspiration from a wartime poem of the same title, one of many within Wei Wei’s epic 2,000-line narrative Dawn Landscape, written in 1942 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In this piece, sound becomes a symbolic color for psychological evocation. The electronic backdrop weaves together narration, drones, radio static, and percussive glitch textures to create an atmosphere of unease and introspection. The acoustic instruments interact through fluid, layered textures, expressing both internal and collective unrest.
The piece reflects on a world in uncertainty, responding to the emotional terrain of the poem and engaging with themes of national trauma, social reflection, and the uncertainty of historical transformation. It seeks to embody the tension between fragility and endurance, and to explore how sound can register memory, silence, and unrest across time and culture.
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Dan Antoniu : Planes Beyond
In Planes Beyond the electronics feature ambient field recordings of nature and animals from South Dakota and Michigan. These sounds ground the piece in our world; however through sonic abstraction these sounds slowly transform into new worlds. The performer inhabits these changing worlds merging, fighting, or overpowering the world by summoning resonances. By bending, twisting and breaking perceived realities I hope to create new perceptual environments for the mind to inhabit.
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Joey Latka : Selves
Selves builds from my experience exploring how Deep Listening fits into a queer creative practice. My practice includes listening to the self internally and externally by engaging with the body's vibrations, its resonances in specific areas, and its adaptability within the environment, which imagines how the self can expand beyond the body’s physical presentation without fear of judgement. Over the course of the piece, I ask the performers to listen to their internal and external selves through their instrument both as an ensemble and individual—thinking of the ensemble as an overall identity and each individual as part of the larger whole—while following a structure built around the Five Gates in Deep Listening practice.
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Bios
As a composer, sound artist, and performer, Dan Antoniu’s music prioritizes gesture, perception, and electronics. Using many mediums, Dan has worked with large ensembles, chamber ensembles, and soloists in acoustic and electroacoustic settings utilizing digital signal processing and fixed media. He’s created multichannel and stereo pieces and made installations focused on resonance and light. Dan has also been developing a performance practice focused on extended voice, bowed guitar, found objects, and augmented instruments.
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Anne La Berge’s passion for the extremes in both composed and improvised music has led her to the fringes of storytelling and sound art as her sources of musical inspiration. She performs as a multimedia soloist and in projects both live and online and is one of the composer/performers in the Amsterdam based ensemble MAZE.
She can be heard on the Largo, Artifact, Etcetera, Hat Art, Frog Peak, Einstein, X-OR, Unsounds, Canal Street, Rambo, esc.rec., Intackt, Data, verz, Real Music House, Relative Pitch, Carrier and Splendor Amsterdam labels. Her music is published by Frog Peak Music and Alry Publications; and her Max-patch based compositions are available from her privately.
She is a founding artist of the Splendor Amsterdam collective of musicians who have transformed an old bathhouse in Amsterdam into a cultural mecca, where she regularly produces and shares small scale concerts with international guests.
La Berge is a precursor of some of the important things contemporary composition has now come to mean. The Wire
In 1999, together Steve Heather and Cor Fuhler, she founded Kraakgeluiden, a improvisation series based in Amsterdam, exploring combinations of acoustic and electronic instruments using real-time interactive performance systems. Many of the resulting musical collaborations have have taken on a life beyond the Kraakgeluiden series, which ceased in 2006. La Berge’s own music has evolved in parallel, and the flute has become only one element in a sound world that includes computer samples, the use of spoken text and electronic processing.
The miracle of her sound technique is supported by, among other things, different lip-positions, attacks, ways of breathing, distance from the microphone – everything has been foreseen and elaborated. . . Her textures are often two-voiced. It is all so complicated that it defies description and yet it sounds very natural, like a bird’s song. Muusika, Tallin
Her music is published by Frog Peak Music, Alry Publications, Donemus and many of her Max patch based compositions are available from her privately. She is the Managing Director of the Volsap Foundation that produces innovative music projects. She works as an improvisation and live electronics coach worldwide and is currently teaching and coaching at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague.
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David Box is an American composer and performer. He earned a MM and BM with honors as an endowed scholar in Saxophone Performance from UT Austin, AA with honors from Riverside City College and is currently a Graduate Part-time Instructor completing a DMA in Composition at Texas Tech University. Upcoming premiere performances include five art songs with poetry by Robert Frost (September), five songs for Soprano and Tenor voice with the Lubbock Symphony featuring local country stars Hannah Jackson and Jonny Hughes (Nov. 22nd), and a new Concerto for Piccolo and Orchestra featuring Lisa Garner Santa with the Texas Tech University Orchestra (Spring 2026). His latest album release on Centaur Records is titled A Touch of Blue. David enjoys activities as a PADI Divemaster, FAA Private Pilot, soccer player, and baseball fan. A fun fact: he circumnavigated the world from Venice to Southampton via the Panama and Suez canals.
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Sofía Matus Cancino (b.1994) is a composer and digital artist interested in visual music, embodied sound, and algorithmic composition. Matus has a piano performance degree from the Conservatory of Music of the State of Mexico, a B.A. in Digital Art from the UAEMéx and an M.A. in Music Technology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her work has been featured at several contemporary music and visual art festivals such as SEAMUS, NodoCCS, CCMC, and Visiones Sonoras. Currently, she is a Doctoral Candidate at Arizona State University, where she holds a Presidential Graduate Assistantship.
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Zhishu Chang (b. 1998) is a Chinese composer and performer based in Baltimore. Her music, described as meticulous, adventurous, and inclusive, draws on traditional Chinese elements while exploring themes of self-worth, environmental consciousness, and intercultural reflection. She has collaborated with ensembles including JACK Quartet, Talea Ensemble, TAK Ensemble, ICE, Divertimento Ensemble, and the Peabody Symphony Orchestra, as well as soloists like Ryan Muncy and Alexander Davis. Awards include the 2024 AGO and BCGS Commission Awards, and prizes from the DeLillo, Malta, Ortmann, and China Conservatory competitions. Her works are published by Schott Music, Modern Press, and the Central Conservatory Press.
Also a pianist, erhu, and pipa player, Chang performs with ensembles such as Orchestra Academia China and HEAT. She holds degrees from the China Conservatory of Music and the Peabody Institute, where she is currently pursuing her D.M.A. with Felipe Lara and Du Yun.
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Max I. Chung is a new music composer and sound artist, traversing borders and building bridges between distinct genres of electroacoustic music. He creates immersive sound worlds that blur the boundaries between acoustic and electronic instrumentation, often interfacing with visual media and process-oriented sound design. Exploring the free association of texture, timbre and color in sound, Chung’s compositions seek to express powerful sonic stories about the inner psyche, creating work that explores primal and visceral sound worlds.
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Pianist and composer Keith Kirchoff has performed throughout North America, Europe, and the Pacific Southwest. A strong advocate for modern music, Kirchoff is committed to fostering new audiences for contemporary music and giving a voice to emerging composers, and to that end has premiered over 100 new works and commissioned over two dozen compositions. Specializing on works which combine interactive electro-acoustics with solo piano, Kirchoff's Electroacoustic Piano Tour has been presented in ten countries, and has spawned three solo albums. Kirchoff is the co-founder and a director of SPLICE and the founder and Artistic Director of Original Gravity Inc. Kirchoff has won awards from the Steinway Society, MetLife Meet the Composer, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and was named the 2011 Distinguished Scholar by the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association. He has recorded on the New World, Kairos, New Focus, Tantara, Ravello, Thinking outLOUD, Zerx, and SEAMUS labels.
You can follow Kirchoff on Twitter @keithkirchoff and learn more at his website: keithkirchoff.com.
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Dean Kyle is a composer, music technologist, and percussionist earning his MM in Composition at Bowling Green State University. In response to his works, audiences have said they “can’t tell where his art stops and the world begins,” and that he has “taught them something about stillness they still don’t understand.” He writes music for both computers and human musicians, exploring connections between music, narrative, theater, and performance art using found objects and familiar human experiences. Dean Kyle's work indulges the world in its own musical sensory delights by basking in the wonder of everyday things. One of his most important guiding principles: The word that connects people to music is “play.”
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Joey Latka is a New York metropolitan based multimedia composer, performer, sound artist, and educator with a Bachelor of Music in Music Performance, Master of Fine Arts in Creative Music Technology, and is pursuing a PhD in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His work contributes to the development of an experimental queer creative practice that infuses elements of real-time interactivity, ecoacoustics, and bioart, and builds on Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice through The Center for Deep Listening. His body of work fundamentally pulls from queer ecology and queer theory that examines the inherent queerness in nature to challenge socially constructed ways of being through artistic practice. Latka also has over a decade of experience as a music educator, choral director, and musical theater director and is equally dedicated to fostering a spirit of innovation and creativity in the next generation of artists.
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Originally from Shenzhen, China, Yuxuan Lin (b.2003) is a NYC-based composer who is intensely interested in the possibilities of combining visual art, dance, and music, and enjoys any opportunity to collaborate. With a unique way of perceiving space and distances, Lin consistently draws inspiration from neurological diversity among artists as a creative resource. As a composer, Lin had collaborated with some of the finest contemporary ensembles and new music advocates such as Talea Ensemble, The Rhythm Method, Salastina, SOLI Chamber Ensemble, and many more. Winner of the 2024 Verdehr Trio Composition Prize and 2023 New Voices in Art Song Series Competition, Lin is currently studying under the guidance of composers Melinda Wagner and Nina Young at The Juilliard School, where she received her Bachelor of Music degree and will continue in Fall 2025 as a Master of Music candidate in composition. Lin also explores creative coding as an extension of her artistic expression.
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Kevin Mah (b. 1992) is a composer and violinist from New Orleans. He earned his BM in Music Composition from Loyola University New Orleans and his MA in Music Composition from Tulane University. Described as maximalist and eclectic some of his acoustic compositions focus on textural soundscapes using post-tonal and filmic undertones as a backdrop. His electronic works explore sound design and synthesis using a pseudo-pop backdrop, occasional with a pinch of musique concrète. Recently his works have striven to bring together idioms from disparate genres, often citing Cyberpunk, Post-humanism, Hyperpop, and Heavy Metal/Emo as significant influences for a perpetual journey of self-expression. Often collaborating with artists to create complementary visuals with his music, Kevin has also worked with TouchDesigner and Pure Data to further explore visuals as music accompaniment. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, photography, video games such as story-heavy RPGs, and Dungeons & Dragons.
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Robin Meiksins is a flutist and improviser focused on collaboration with living composers and music performance through the internet. Chicago-based, she uses online media to support and create collaboration, as well as more traditional means of performance. Robin’s biggest creative platform is YouTube. On her channel she is most known for her long term collaborative projects, the first being 365 Days of Flute in 2016-2017. Robin has since completed 5 more long term Youtube projects. Most recently, Robin completed two projects highlighting improvisation and Chicago beer and breweries. Robin has premiered over 200 works written by living composers. In September 2022, she premiered two works for woodwind trio for Arc Project’s “Three Winds” project. She has performed at the SEAMUS national conference, EMM, SPLICE Institute and Festival, and Oh My Ears festival, among others.
Robin holds a masters degree from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music where she studied with Kate Lukas and Thomas Robertello. Robin received a Bachelors of Music with Distinction from University of Toronto, having studied with Leslie Newman.
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SPLICE Ensemble is a trumpet, piano, and percussion trio focused on cultivating a canon of electroacoustic chamber music. Called a “sonic foodfight” by Jazz Weekly, SPLICE Ensemble works with composers and performers on performance practice techniques for collaboration and integrating electronics into a traditional performance space. The resident ensemble of both SPLICE Institute and SPLICE Festival, SPLICE Ensemble has been a featured ensemble at M Woods in Beijing, SEAMUS, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, SCI National, Electronic Music Midwest, and New Music Detroit’s Strange Beautiful Music 10. They have recorded on both the SEAMUS and Parma Labels.
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Adam Vidiksis is a drummer and composer based in Philadelphia who explores social structures, science, and the intersection of humankind with the machines we build. His music examines technological systems as artifacts of human culture, acutely revealed in the slippery area where these spaces meet and overlap—a place of friction, growth, and decay. Vidiksis is a sought-after champion of new works for percussion and electronics, performing as a featured artist in venues around the world. Vidiksis’s music has won numerous awards and grants, including recognition from the Society of Composers, Incorporated, the American Composers Forum, New Music USA, National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, and ASCAP. His works are available through HoneyRock Publishing, EMPiRE, New Focus, PARMA, and SEAMUS Records. Vidiksis recently served as composer in residence for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia and was selected by the NEA and Japan-US Friendship Commission, serving as Director of Arts Technology for a performance of a new work during the 2020 Olympics in Japan. Vidiksis is Assistant Professor of music technology at Temple University and President of SPLICE Music. He performs in SPLICE Ensemble and the Transonic Orchestra, conducts Ensemble N_JP, and directs the Boyer College Electroacoustic Ensemble Project (BEEP).
www.vidiksis.com
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Po-Ting Wang, born in 1999 in Taipei, Taiwan, has an extensive academic background in music. She previously studied at Guangren Elementary School’s music program, Daren Girls’ High School, Keelung High School’s music program, and earned her bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Taipei. She holds a master’s degree in composition from the Taipei National University of the Arts and is currently pursuing composition studies at Boston Conservatory at Berklee as a PSC student.
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Sam Wells is a musician and artist based in Philadelphia, whose work often invokes a heightened sense of the entanglements of space, air, breath, and body. Manifesting as music composition, performance, and improvisation, as well as multimedia performance and installation, his work is experientially substantial. It is rooted in the humanity of breath and highlights our interrelations with the cosmic, terrestrial, social, and internal spaces that surround us.
Sam is a trumpeter and improviser who has performed around the world and is a member of SPLICE Ensemble, Aeroidio, and the Miller/Vidiksis/Wells trio. He has also performed with Contemporaneous, Metropolis Ensemble, Nate Wooley, TILT Brass, the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, and the Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra. Sam has recorded on the Scarp Records, New Amsterdam/Nonesuch, New Focus Records, SEAMUS, and Ravello Recordings labels.
As a composer, Sam creates acoustic, electroacoustic, and electronic works, often incorporating multimedia elements. His works have been performed throughout the United States and internationally. He is a recipient of a 2016 Jerome Fund for New Music award, and his work “stringstrung” is the winner of the 2016 Miami International Guitar Festival Composition Competition. As an avid collaborator, Sam has written for theater and dance productions, as well as for many notable performers of contemporary music such as HOCKET, SPLICE Ensemble, Maya Bennardo, Dana Jessen, Vicki Ray, Lin Faulk, Kenken Gorder, and Will Yager.
Technology is a deep through line of Sam’s practice, and he is active as a music technologist. Sam is a Cycling ’74 Max Certified Trainer and organizes the Max Meetup Philadelphia event series. He runs Scarp Records, a record label dedicated to highlighting the experimental and improvisational practices of performer/composers.
Sam currently serves as the Member At Large for the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), as well as a board member for SPLICE Music, the parent organization of SPLICE Institute, Festival, and Ensemble, dedicated to the performance, creation, and development of music for performers and electronics.
Sam holds degrees in both performance and composition from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, graduate degrees in Trumpet Performance and Computer Music Composition from Indiana University, and a doctoral degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Sam is an Assistant Professor of Music Technology at Temple University.
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