Luke Dahl is an Assistant Professor of Composition and Computer Technologies in the Music Department at the University of Virginia. He teaches classes on music technology, audio signal processing, and music interaction design. His research is primarily situated in the interdisciplinary field of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), which investigates and explores the intersection of technology and musical practice through the activities of design, musical performance, and empirical research. He is especially interested in systems for digitally-mediated real-time music collaboration and the role of human gesture and movement in music.
Dr. Dahl earned his Ph.D. in Computer-Based Music Theory and Acoustics from the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University and a bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan. At CCRMA, he was a founding member of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra and the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra. His musical works include SoundBounce for mobile phone orchestra, which was performed at NIME in Sydney, and TweetDreams for audience interaction and live Twitter data, which was premiered at the MiTo Settembre Musica Festival in Milan and has been performed in Oslo, San Francisco, Stony Brook, and at TEDx Silicon Valley.
Before returning to academia, Luke worked at the Joint E-mu/Creative Advanced Technology Center, where he developed reverb algorithms for the SoundBlasterLive sound card products and co-authored patents on audio signal processing, and at Apple, where he worked on audio for iPod and laptop products.
Dr. Dahl has recently released alpha versions of two software libraries: Modosc is a Max library for processing motion-capture data in real-time to enable movement-based interactions, which was created in collaboration with Dr. Federico Visi. Bf-Pd is a library written in PureData that facilitates real-time data-sharing and collaboration between musicians in spontaneously formed ensembles. Bf-Pd was developed in collaboration with Dr. Florent Berthaut at Université de Lille.
