Panaiotis
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Composer • Musician • Educator
Music Software Development
Panaiotis is a conservatory trained composer who earned his Ph.D in music at UC San Diego. He has performed worldwide as a singer and composer of electronic and acoustic music. His Ballad of Frankie Silver was preformed by a Swiss dance company at the ’96 Summer Olympics.
Panaiotis has been programming computers and developing technology for as long as he has been composing and performing music. He was a research assistant professor of Computer Engineering and Fine Arts at UNM, developing VR based data display systems for LANL and DTRA. He has been awarded three patents for his technology solutions.
More recently, Panaiotis developed a computer-based musical instrument designed to be accessible to people with physical, cognitive, and musical challenges. One of his interactive music systems was used in the Spinal Cord Injury Unit of the Raymond G. Murphy Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
From 2003 -2008 Panaiotis was Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as well as in the Department of Music at the University of New Mexico. Panaiotis worked on several projects in the Visualization Laboratory at the Center for High Performance Computing related to medical education as well as national security related projects since 2002 when he moved to Albuquerque.
Key projects include network connection analysis with Los Alamos National Laboratories, and a virtual reified kidney nephron as part of the Telehealth Outreach for Unified Community Health. This latter project, originally designed as an educational tool for medical education, was included as part of the Art and Artifice of Science exhibition at the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts, followed by two medical conferences: the 8th Annual Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare, and the 16th Annual Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR) conference. Two years previously, Panaiotis delivered a paper at MMVR-14 on the subject of using algorithmically generated music to enhance learning of complex systems.
As part of an interdisciplinary team at the University of New Music, Panaiotis contributed to the design of a decision support tool for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and presented a paper: Algorithmically Generated Music Enhances VR Decision Support Tool, at the Science and Technology for Chem-Bio Information Systems (S&T CBIS) Conference, October, 2005.
Aside from the musification research, Panaiotis continues worked on purely artistic projects, such as dance and video collaborations with choreographer Jennifer Predock-Linnell and photographer Joyce Neimanas. He has created film scores (The Kiss and Fugue State), and created motion graphics promotional videos for Chamber Music Albuquerque. In 2005 the Santa Fe Community Orchestra commissioned him to write a concerto for electronics and orchestra: Northern Lights, which they premiered at the St. Francis Auditorium in Santa Fe, NM, June 2005 under the baton of Oliver Prezant.
Panaiotis also taught cross-listed interdisciplinary classes in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Music, as well as in the Departments of Media Arts, Art and Art History, and the Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media program. Courses are related to algorithmic composition and interactive media systems.
He lived in Central Florida from 1997-2002 where he taught World Music and electronic music at Stetson University and Rollins College. It was during this period that he collaborated with Indian santur performer Nadkishor Muley to produce their CD: Rising Sun. Panaiotis also received a commission to write The Labyrinth as part of the Music in Motion project with the Relâche Ensemble and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
While living in New York from 1987-1996, Panaiotis co-founded the Deep Listening Band with Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster, producing several CDs and touring throughout Europe, Japan and the US. He received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1995 to write his second opera, The Traveling Companion. It was also during this time that his Ballad of Frankie Silver was premiered by the Cathy Sharp Dance Ensemble in Basel Switzerland, which was later performed at the UGA Arts96 as part of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Athens, GA. He also completed a full-length music and sound design for a production of The Tempest produced by the Basler Marionetten Theatre.
In 1988 he founded PanDigital Corporation to design and develop electronic performance hardware and software. Development included residencies at the Theater School for New Dance Development and STEIM in Amsterdam, The Banff Centre in Alberta Canada, and The Center for New Music and Audio Technology at UC Berkeley. In 1994 he was granted a patent for his PanPaw, a three-dimensional continuous foot controller.
At this time he began development of his SoundCycler algorithmic music tool, which later became the basis for his recent research in using music as a medium for analyzing complex data. Development of SoundCycler began as a tool to study harmony. Soon after he completed the first version it became clear that it was a viable compositional assistant. Much of the electronic music composed since this time has used SoundCycler music textures to varying degrees. In addition, the kidney nephron music is completely generated with SoundCycler.
As a composer whose works have been performed throughout the US, Europe, and Japan, he has toured worldwide as singer and as performer of computer assisted music. He has collaborated in the creation of several compact disk recordings, two of which were chosen by The New York Times as among the top ten CDs of new music for their respective release years. Panaiotis composes for theater, film, dance, and he works with traditional and experimental media.
His extensive involvement with dance includes improvisation, live dance, and dance videos. The Swiss dance company Tanz Ensemble Cathy Sharp, performed The Ballad of Frankie Silver throughout Europe before giving its US premiere at the UGA Arts ‘96 Olympic Cultural Festival. Awakening was commissioned as part of an American Dance Festival residency. Panaiotis collaborated with visual and film artists Joyce Neimenas and Moira Speers-Ellis, and choreographer Jennifer Predock-Linnell to create over a dozen dance videos, improvisations, and dance concerts.
In 1988 Panaiotis co-founded the Deep Listening Band with Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster. From 1988-1993 they performed in such places as a 14 foot deep underground cistern at Fort Warden in Washington state, where the band recorded two CDs (Deep Listening and The Ready-made Boomerang), an underground limestone mine in upstate New York (Troglodyte’s Delight), a lava cave on the Canary Islands, and Panasonic Hall in Tokyo where, for a five hour marathon concert, he moved the music of his colleagues and ten Japanese artists through a configuration of 750 loudspeakers that were built into the walls and ceiling.
Panaiotis has written music for numerous plays including a production of Death of a Salesman in Potsdam Germany and a sound track for a puppet theater production of The Tempest for the Basler Marionetten Theatre in Basel, Switzerland.
Panaiotis wrote his first opera, The Akeda, while working on his Ph.D. at UC. San Diego. During that time he wrote music for over twenty-four theater productions. He received his Master of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music and his Bachelor of Music degree from East Carolina University.
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