Samuel Hertz, composer and performer, received his MFA at Mills College, California, where he studied composition and electronic music with Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, and Maggi Payne. His work has been seen and heard at ACUD MACHT NEU (Berlin), Lake Studios (Berlin), Le Café Central (Brussels), Bains Connective/Ten Weyngaert (Brussels), ACRE Gallery/ACRE-TV (Chicago), ARTX (Long Beach), Jack Straw New Media Gallery (Seattle), Harvestworks (New York), Spectrum (New York), the Uncreativity Festival (Minneapolis), and WBEZ Radio (Chicago), among others. Recently, he composed a number of works for chamber ensemble, electroacoustic ensemble, and fixed media, focusing on spatialized sound and compositional psychoacoustics. Samuel has worked as a technical assistant to, and performed with, Morton Subotnick, Alvin Curran, and John Driscoll. He recently completed work on a 40.4 concert speaker system at The Lab in San Francisco, utilizing custom-programmed ambisonic encoding and decoding schemata, and he is currently working on a commission for electroacoustic solo performance from the Opus Centrum Ensemble (Bourges, France), as well as premiering new work at San Francisco’s Center for New Music. Samuel’s recent research focuses on the importance of nonlinearity in the event space of perception and music composition, working with compositional psychoacoustics within the framework of artificial sound environments. Engaged in the ideas of “embodied sound” and situating the body as a porous and generative agent between the poietic and aesthetic realms, his studies of the natural creative faculties of the body draw on diverse sources such as Victorian energetics, medieval conceptions of illness and melancholia, sonorous architectural spaces, and contemporary performance and dance scholarship.