Student

I am a composer and improviser in the Music Composition PhD program. My music often plays with the relationship between the musician and their instrument or, more recently, between the voice and the body. I try to use technology to extend and disrupt these relationships. In practice, this means I am learning to use sensor technology and controller design to build new musical instruments and sound installations.

I grew up in Quito, Ecuador, and obtained my BA from Columbia University. Between 2017 and 2019, I completed MMus programs in Composition and Sonic Arts at Goldsmiths,...

Art of Voice and Body
performance, improvisation, composition, stories, poetry, theater, interdisciplinary art

I attune to depth of stories and create a sonic and visual space through my voice and body. I focus on the nuanced potentialities of my voice, and my body of listening and sensing. I try to cross boundaries within and outside of my body in my attempt to defy traditional power structures that preclude new ways of feelings. I think about sound of the snow outside the window, a song inside body, and memories at site. I listen to inner, silence, temporality of insects...

Soren Nyhus is a first-year Musicology PhD student at UC Berkeley. He received a Bachelor’s in Music from Harvard University in 2022 and an MPhil in Music from Cambridge University in 2023. His master’s thesis, “The Italian Renaissance in Viennese Opera of the First World War”, investigates the ways in which portrayals of the Renaissance in operas performed at the Vienna Hofoper during World War I navigated questions of ethnic, religious, and political identities. He is broadly interested in questions of modernism and nationalism in the early twentieth century, especially in the German-...