Please visit my website for detailed information.

Research fields:

analysis of wind instrument music performance
live-electronics + New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME)
improvisation and contemporary music
virtual reality audio
acoustics, sound synthesis, sound design
interactive music-systems, machine listening, music information retrieval

Alex Hofmann is a professor in Music Acoustics at mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. He investigates tools and methods to enhance expressivity in music performance by advancing new sensor technologies and developing dedicated computer algorithms, currently within the FWF-PEEK project Études for Live-Electronics, as well as the ASEA-Uninet Project Towards an alliance for distributed ethnomusicology data.

He had previously done research at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), taught at different institutions (e.g. Dept. of Musicology, Vienna University), worked as a Teaching Assistant at the TU Berlin (Audio Communication Group), and as a Sound Design Assistant at Native Instruments.

As an active member in the Csound (computer music language) community, he worked as a co-editor for the books “Csound Floss Manual” (Heintz et al., 2011), and “Ways Ahead - Proceedings of the First International Csound conference” (Heintz et al., 2013), which document Csound’s open-source software development towards real-time sound synthesis in the last 25 years.

In his Ph.D., Alex analyzed motor-actions in clarinet and saxophone performance using miniaturized sensor-technology and advanced signal processing methods. He presents artistic work and research results in concerts or spoken presentations as well as in workshops at venues such as the Akademie der Künste Berlin (DE), Berklee College of Music (Boston, US), BEK (Bergen Center for Electronic Arts, NO), ZKM (Karlsruhe, DE), RADIALSYSTEM V (Berlin, DE) and maintains active exchange with computer music communities such as the Linux Audio Community and NIME.

Since Oct. 2022 Deputy Head of the Department of Music Acoustics (IWK), since 2020 main member of the Works Council for the academic and artistic university staff of mdw, substitute member for the mid-level staff in the Senate (2019-22).

Research Publications & Talks

A list of publications can be found here.

Current Projects:

Études for Live-Electronics (funded by FWF-PEEK) is an artistic research project that aims to re-define the western classical music-influenced concept of études, by applying it to the diverse practices in the field of electronic music performance. (2022–25)
VRACE - Virtual Reality Audio for Cyber Environments This project focuses on the analysis, modelling and rendering of dynamic 3-dimensional soundscapes for applications in Virtual and Augmented Reality. 17 academic and industrial partners strive to make significant progress on the way towards a physically correct virtual reality and thus towards a true world simulation. (2018–23)
Towards an alliance for distributed ethnomusicology data (funded by ASEA-Uninet, 2018-2022; project lead: MDW) This project will examine the current situation of data sets in ethno-musicology towards the development of standardized ways for data storage and data access between partner organizations. To this end, we plan to form an initial alliance that collects the requirements for an interoperable data infrastructure for digital musicology projects in the South-East Asian region and builds first examples of tentative applications by means of automatic content and metadata analysis. Goal of the project is to design a strategy that allows the storage of data sets in a standardized way that supports an exchange of (meta) data between partner organizations.

Past Projects:

INSYNC During my time at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), I worked in a research group lead by Werner Goebl on “Synchronization and Communication in Music Ensembles”.
FWF-Clarinet

More details on previous projects can be found here.

Tutorial & Workshop Presenter at:

“3rd WORKSHOP ON DISTRIBUTED ETHNOMUSICOLOGY DATA AND MUSIC INFORMATION RETRIVAL” at Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur (July 2022).
“2ST WORKSHOP ON DISTRIBUTED ETHNOMUSICOLOGY DATA AND MUSIC INFORMATION RETRIVAL” at Mahidol University in Bangkok in July 2019.
Csound Workshop as part of the NIME 2019 conference in Porto Alegre (Brazil).
“1ST WORKSHOP ON DISTRIBUTED ETHNOMUSICOLOGY DATA AND MUSIC INFORMATION RETRIVAL” at Mahidol University in Bangkok in Jan. 2019.
Workshop on building live-electronic tools with Csound on the Bela-Board, at Incontri at the Hmtm-Hannover.
COSMO Workshop 2016 @ BEK - Bergen Center for Electronic Arts (NO)
COSMO Workshop 2016 @ Maynooth University (IR)
Raspberry Pi Audio Workshop 2016 @ HMTM, Hannover (DE)
Live Electronics Workshop 2015 @ Akademie der Künste Berlin (DE)
COSMO Workshop 2016 Bitraf, Oslo (NO)
COSMO Workshop 2015 FIX Makerspace, Trondheim (NO)

Research community services:

Editorial work:

J. Heintz, A. Hofmann, and I. McCurdy, editors. Ways Ahead: Proc. of the First International Csound Conference. Cambridge Scholar Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 2013. (Additional contribution of 13 interviews with electro-acoustic composers).
J. Heintz, A. Hofmann, and I. McCurdy, editors. Csound - Floss Manual. FLOSS Manuals Foundation, first edition, 2011.

Program Chair / Music Chair:

Local organising committee of the Vienna Talk (on Music Acoustics) 2022, (AT)
Co-Conference Chair for the ICSC 2019
Local organising committee of the Vienna Talk (on Music Acoustics) 2015, (AT)
Local organising committee of the International Symposium on Performance Science 2013, Vienna (AT)
Initiator of the First International Csound Conference 2011, Hannover (DE)

Reviewer:

International Csound Conference
Sound & Music Computing Conference (SMC)
International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME)
Journal of New Music Research (JNMR)
Frontiers in Psychology: Performance Science
Acta Acustica united with Acustica
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA)

Workshop Organisation:

“2ST WORKSHOP ON DISTRIBUTED ETHNOMUSICOLOGY DATA AND MUSIC INFORMATION RETRIVAL” at Mahidol University in Bangkok in July 2019.
“1ST WORKSHOP ON DISTRIBUTED ETHNOMUSICOLOGY DATA AND MUSIC INFORMATION RETRIVAL” at Mahidol University in Bangkok in Jan. 2019.

Honors:

“Bernd Rode Award 2022” des OeAD, ASEA-Uninet Projekt: "Ausarbeitung einer Strategie zur Vernetzung verteilter Daten musikethnologischer Sammlungen".
“Best Student Paper in Musical Acoustics” for Pàmies-Vilà, M., Hofmann, A., & Chatziioannou, V. (2019). Reproducing tonguing strategies in single-reed woodwinds using an artificial blowing machine (abstract). In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics.
“Best Student Paper in Musical Acoustics” for Pamies-Vila, M., Scavone, G., Hofmann, A., & Chatziioannou, V. (2017). Investigating vocal tract effects during note transitions on the saxophone (abstract). In Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Fall 2017 meeting) (Vol. 142, pp. 2545–2545). With a follow up publication in Pàmies-Vilà, M., Scavone, G., Hofmann, A., & Chatziioannou, V. (2017). Investigating vocal tract modifications during saxophone performance. In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (Vol. 31, p. 035002). https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0000758 (pdf)
“Best hack on Handsfree Music Selection” Waves Vienna Music Hackday 2017 (AT) for a Music Quiz in Google Assistant (not maintained afterwards) Saranya Balasubramanian, Montserrat Pamies-Vila, Alex Hofmann
“Best hack on Music & Emotion Waves Vienna Music Hackday 2016”, (AT) for Moody the Music Chatbot, Saranya Balasubramanian and Alex Hofmann
“Student Paper Award” at the 5th Congress of the Alps Adria Acoustics Association (HR) for Hofmann, A., Chatziioannou, V., Kausel, W., Goebl, W., Weilguni, M., & Smetana, W. (2012). The influence of tonguing on tone production with single-reed instruments. In 5th Congress of the Alps Adria Acoustics Association. Zadar, Croatia.

Teaching:

You can find all courses taught by this teacher here:

https://online.mdw.ac.at/mdw_online/wblvangebot.wbshowlvoffer?ppersonnr=25286