John Gibson

   Assistant Professor(Composition),Jacobs School of Music

   Assistant Director, Center for Electronic and Computer Music

Project: Building the Laptop Orchestra

John Gibson is Assistant Professor of Composition at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. His instrumental and electronic music has received performances by the London Sinfonietta, the Seattle Symphony, Speculum Musicae, and at numerous conferences and festivals, including Tanglewood, Marlboro, Bourges Synthèse, Brazilian Symposium on Computer Music, Third Practice, SEAMUS, and International Computer Music Conferences held in Beijing, Havana, Belfast, and Copenhagen.

Significant awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Paul Jacobs Memorial Fund Commission from the Tanglewood Music Center. Recordings of his music appear on the Centaur and Everglade labels. He writes sound processing and synthesis software and has taught composition and computer music at the University of Virginia, Duke University, and the University of Louisville. He holds a Ph.D. in music from Princeton University. 

His recent work seeks to present traditional acoustic instruments in a new light by transforming their sound in unexpected ways using his own custom software. The focus of his IDAH Fellowship work is the composition of music for laptop orchestra, in which multiple laptop performers collaborate by exchanging sound and information via a wireless network.