Fredrik Gran

At EMS November 9–14, 2026

Fredrik Gran is a Stockholm-based composer, artistic researcher, and developer of robotic musical performance systems. His work moves between acoustic and electroacoustic composition, performance, and robotics, exploring non-human performers, mechanical musicianship, and sound as a physical, embodied, and scenographic phenomenon.

Combining acoustic instruments, amplified objects, live electronics, and custom-built systems, Gran develops works that investigate the musical and perceptual possibilities of mechanical processes and machine agency. A central strand of his practice is long-term research into robotic instrumental performance. Since 2009, he has explored robotic playing techniques for the cello, culminating in the development of the robot cellist: a non-human performer consisting of two industrial robotic arms playing a cello.

His music has been presented internationally in concert, installation, and interdisciplinary contexts across Europe, North America, and Asia, including festivals such as Warsaw Autumn and large-scale immersive productions at Sphere, Las Vegas. He studied composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and at McGill University in Montréal, where his doctoral research is affiliated with CIRMMT.

During the ComposersLAB residency at EMS he hopes to explore compositional methods across electroacoustic practice, studio-based experimentation, and shared listening, while remaining open to the forms of collaboration that may emerge through the ComposersLAB group. His own work often engages timbre, spatiality, embodiment, and technologically mediated sound, and he is interested in how these concerns can be developed further in dialogue with other composers and within the studio environment at EMS.

Rather than pursuing a fully predetermined outcome, he sees the residency as a space for inquiry, sketching, testing, and mutual influence — a setting in which new artistic directions, materials, and possible future collaborations may take shape.