AES New York 2017 Presenter or Author
Ben Houge
Primary Affiliation: Berklee College of Music - Boston, MA, USA
Ben Houge is an artist working at the intersection of music composition, digital art, video games, performance, and gastronomy. Highlights of his twenty-one-year career in the video game industry include composing the acclaimed string quartet soundtrack for Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura (2001) and developing an innovative cell-based music deployment system as audio director of Tom Clancy’s EndWar (2008). From 2004 to 2010 he lived in Shanghai, where he was active in the Chinese art community, and his real-time, multichannel sound work has been exhibited internationally. His current work investigates the connections between music, gastronomy, and technology in a series of multisensory dining events he calls “food operas,” drawing on recent technological advances to achieve an unprecedentedly close pairing of music with a meal, combining aspects of performance, sound installation, and video game design.
Houge has lectured widely and presented his work at the International Computer Music Conference, the first three Web Audio Conferences, the International Symposium on Electronic Art, the Game Developers Conference (in San Francisco as well as in Shanghai), and at institutions including Harvard, MIT, Oxford, and the Fat Duck. He holds degrees in music composition from St. Olaf College and the University of Washington, and he is currently an associate professor in the Electronic Production and Design department at Berklee College of Music. From 2013 to 2015, he relocated to Spain to help launch the Music Production, Technology, and Innovation master’s program at Berklee’s new campus in Valencia. In the summer 2017 semester, he presented a new Music + Food class, in which students’ final project was to develop software to score a four-course meal in collaboration with chefs at America’s Test Kitchen.
For more on the food opera project, visit http://www.audiogustatory.com/.
More Info: http://benhouge.com/
Session List
Oct 20:
EC11: Teaching Electronic Musical Instrument Design: Technologies and Techniques (Panelist)