Thor Magnusson

Thor Magnusson

Research Professor, Philosophy, University of Iceland

MishMash role: Member

Thor Magnusson is a Professor in Future Music at the University of Sussex and a Research Professor at the University of Iceland. His work focusses on the impact of digital technologies on musical creativity, explored equally through practice (software development, composition, performance), theory (publications, lecturing, talks) and education (teaching, workshops, tutorials). Magnusson’s research is underpinned by the philosophy of technology and cognitive science, exploring issues of embodiment and compositional constraints in digital musical systems as practiced by musicians in concrete situations. He is the co-founder of ixi audio (www.ixi-audio.net) and he has developed audio software and systems of generative music composition, written computer music tutorials, and created three musical live coding environments. Magnusson is currently running a 5-year ERC-funded project called "Intelligent Instruments" at the University of Iceland. Further information on the Intelligent Instruments Lab website: www.iil.is In 2016, Magnusson was appointed as Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow on a project that involved organising conferences and symposia on new musical technologies (see www.sonicwriting.org). This work culminated in a monograph called Sonic Writing: The Technologies of Material, Symbolic and Signal Inscriptions, published by Bloomsbury Academic. By exploring how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media, including symbolic musical notation, the book builds theoretical foundations for the study of creative AI and machine learning in future music. Other research involves developing machine learning for creative coding as part of the MIMIC project (www.mimicproject.com), of which the Sussex team has recently launched the Sema system (www.sema.codes) for developing new live coding languages for machine learning. Magnusson is also member of the international TENOR resarch network (https://tenor-network.org) that explores new technologies for musical notation and representation. He sits on the editorial board of the International Journal of Digital Media and Performance Arts and is on the organistional committee of conferences such as International Conference on Live Interfaces, International Conference on Live Coding and xCoAx. Magnusson has presented work and performed at various festivals and conferences, such as Transmediale, Ars Electronica, Ertz, Darmstadt Summer School, Encounters Festival, Dark Music Days, RE:New, Sonar, ISEA (International Symposium for Electronic Arts), ICMC (International Computer Music Conference), NIME Conference (New Interfaces for Musical Expression), Impact festival, Soundwaves, Cybersonica, Ultrasound and Pixelache. Further information here: http://thormagnusson.github.io

Music Technology Instruments Artificial Intelligence Performance Improvisation Notation Philo

MishMash Projects

Latest results

  2. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 2025

    Evolving the Living Looper: Artistic Research, Online Learning and Tentacle Pendula

  3. International Computer Music Conference Icmc Proceedings, 2025

    Notochord Homunculus: A Playground for Low-Latency Deep Generative MIDI

  5. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Interspeech, 2025

    Tungnaá in Live Performance: An Implementation of Interactive Artistic Text-To-Voice

  6. International Computer Music Conference Icmc Proceedings, 2025

    dit dah delta token: Statistical Models of Music and Language Interfering via Morse Code

  9. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 2024

    About TIME: Textile Interfaces for Musical Expression

  10. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 2024

    Querying the Ghost: AI Hauntography in NIME