Hunter Brown is a Berlin-based composer and improviser. His music is made from codecs, machine listening, analysis, and synthesis: the infrastructure of digital audio, turned toward reorienting the act of listening. His work takes the form of fixed-media composition, music for instruments and electronics, multichannel sound installation, and custom software. Boring Like A Drill has described his work as taking “a David Tudor-like approach to glitch, interrogating the principle upon which the digital error operates and then applying it as a compositional method.”
Improvisation is central to Hunter’s performance practice. He regularly performs with his Improvisation Instrument, a custom system developed in SuperCollider, both as a soloist and in collaborative projects including Technical Reserve and Other Plastics: “a set full of crackling energy, tensile yet static, the audience hanging on every sound” (The Wire).
His work has been presented at Ars Electronica (Linz), Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Darmstadt), Big Ears (Knoxville), Cafe OTO (London), IRCAM Manifeste (Paris), Festival Nueva Ópera (Buenos Aires), Lobe 4DSOUND (Vancouver), and KM28 (Berlin), and he has presented research at the International Computer Music Conference, the Conference on AI Music Creativity, and NIME. He has been commissioned by Ensemble Dal Niente, Line Upon Line Percussion, and Fundación Williams, and his work has been performed by the Mivos Quartet, Fonema Consort, and the Nois Saxophone Quartet. Derivatives was a finalist in the 2025 Prix CIME Electroacoustic Music Competition.
His recordings appear on Party Perfect, Carrier, 1473, and Creative Sources, including Stoppages Vols. 1–3 and releases with Technical Reserve and Other Plastics.
Hunter holds a BM from the Oberlin Conservatory and an MA in Digital Musics from Dartmouth College, and is a PhD candidate in composition at the University of Chicago. He works as a freelance audio engineer, serves as technical director for Ensemble Dal Niente, and co-founded the record label Party Perfect. He has taught electronic music at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the University of Chicago.