Scott L. Miller

Scott L. Miller is an American composer and improviser. His music is characterized by collaborative approaches to composition, the use of electronics, and improvisation. Inspired by the inner-workings of sound in the natural and mechanical worlds, his music is the product of hands-on experimentation and collaboration with musicians and performers from across the spectrum of styles. Miller’s recent work explores virtual and augmented reality to immerse the audience, geolocate sound in parks and farms, and animate graphic scores.

He is interested in spatialized sounds that juxtapose synthetic and organic materials, drawing attention to the details found in the world we inhabit. This is a fundamental aspect of his ecosystemic works, which model the behavior of objects from the natural world in electronic sound, creating interactive sonic ecosystems, the result of autonomous sounds competing for sonic space. Ecosystemic pieces are intimately tied to the space they occur in, magnifying sound’s underlying physical nature and revealing what physicist Denis Gabor labeled the ‘quantum level of sound.’ Related to this work is his interest in spatial synthesis, uniting the spatial location and vector of sounds to their spectral identity.

Miller is a three time McKnight Composer Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and Past-President of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the U.S. His music is available on New Focus Recordings, ein_klang, Innova, and others, and is published by American Composers Edition. Miller is a Professor of Music at St. Cloud State University, and he is Director of SEAMUS Records.