Guerino Mazzola & Reza Negarestani | Sonic Practice, Discourse and Auditory Experimentation

Guerino Mazzola earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Zurich University, where he also taught algebraic geometry. Mazzola has been a major figure within the European school of mathematical music theory since 1980 and has written six books on the subject including The Topos of Music, which was proposed by the American Mathematical Society as the mathematics book of the year in 2005. His 2010 book Musical Performance is the first comprehensive treatment of performance theory, including philosophical and empirical approaches, qualitative methods from musical ontology, and quantitative methods from differential geometry and their implementation in the performance software rubato. Mazzola is a guest professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and a Professor for collaborative arts and music theory at the School of Music, University of Minnesota.

Reza Negarestani is an Iranian philosopher and writer whose philosophical works have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Collapse, Angelaki, Ctheory, Identities and The Speculative Turn. Rated by Artforum International as as one of the best books of 2009, his post-genre theory-fiction book Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials reached international acclaim. The book, along with his other texts have been the focus of seminars and classes at The New School, Columbia University, and  Duke University. Most recently, Negarestani co-edited with Robin Mackay an extensive volume on philosophy and culinary arts entitled Culinary Materialism.

Index terms:  Philosophy of Synthesis, Topology, Gesture in Philosophy, Category Theory, Mathematical Music, Performance Theory, Computer Musicology

This series was funded in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT.