Patricia Alessandrini

Patricia Alessandrini is a Franco-American composer and sound artist known for her mixed media and intermedial works, which frequently feature interactive and theatrical installations and performances. Through this multiplicity of forms, she actively confronts questions of repertoire, canonicity, (re)presentation, interpretation, perception and memory, while engaging with social and political issues.

Her works have been presented in North and South America, Asia, Australia and in more than 15 European countries, during festivals including Archipel, Ars Musica, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Electric Spring, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Heidelberger Frühling, Gaudeamus, Mostly Mozart, Musica Strasbourg, Rainy Days, Ruhrtriennale, Salzburg Biennale, TimeSpans, Transit, Wien Modern, and Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik. She is also a live electronics performer and improviser, and designs and builds her own electronic interfaces and instruments. Gramophone Magazine described Leçons de ténèbres, her portrait CD of works with real-time electronics released in 2023, as 'superbly well-crafted'.

She studied composition and computer music at the Conservatorio G.B.Martini di Bologna, at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg and at Ircam. She holds two doctorates, from Princeton University and the Sonic Arts Research Center (SARC) at Queens University Belfast respectively. She has taught advanced Computer-Aided Composition at the Scuola Superiore of the Accademia Musicale Pescarese, Composition with Technology at Bangor University, and Computer Music and Sonic Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, before being appointed professor of composition at Stanford University in 2018, where she performs research on interaction, multimodal sound experiences and immersive audiovisual situations, including the design of instruments for inclusive participation, at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). In 2024, she named Full Professor of Artistic Research at the Haute École de Musique - Lausanne.

She serves on the international board of Share Music & Performing Arts, a Swedish center for inclusion, and as principal investigator for Stanford University in the EU Horizon project Multisensory, User-centered, Shared cultural Experiences through Interactive Technology (MuseIT, 2022-2025). In 2022, she received the Guggenheim Foundation Music Composition Prize, and in 2024, she was awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University to support the development of her cyberfeminist-futurist stage work. This project will be the focus of her Fresnoy residency, in particular, the development of interactive soft robotics systems responding to biodata.

This new project is a continuation of her previous works taking a critical look at technological developments and their dominant paradigms from a feminist point of view. In 2016, she created the stage work Parlor Sounds for the Edinburgh International Science Festival, in which a woman transgressively transforms household appliances into interactive electronic instruments, a process in which the performers actively participated by learning circuit bending techniques; and in 2019 - 2021 she realized Ada's Song, a tribute to Ada Lovelace featuring the Piano Machine, a robotic system that excites the strings of a piano in response to musicians, in order to render machine learning processes audible, visible and comprehensible to the public