Join us on Saturday, March 29, 2025 as the Creative Audio Archive collaborates with Asian Improv Arts Midwest to present a free, public Listening Party and Screening of rarely seen archival footage documenting a live performance by the Fred Anderson Trio in Osaka in 1999. The screening will be followed by a live discussion with Aoki. 

Chicago Creative Machines presents Bryan Pardo’s Interactive Audio Lab, where they invent new tools to find, label, separate, modify, and generate sound. Pardo will discuss several projects illustrative of the work in the lab.

Chicago Creative Machines presents Caitlyn Min-ji Au in a talk about indeterminacy and her work-in-progress with roombas.

Chicago Creative Machines presents Ted Moore in a free FluCoMa workshop!

This workshop introduces participants to FluCoMa, a toolkit for making music with machine listening and machine learning within Max, SuperCollider, and Pure Data.

This Saturday, March 1st at Parachute HiFi join ESS for a Creative Audio Archive DJ set by CAA Archives Manager James Wetzel. Swing by from 7-11 PM for great food, drinks, and sounds!

Join us for an evening with the Patchbent community at Dark Matter Coffee’s Star Lounge. This meetup is an open time to hang out and see what others have been working on.

Chicago Creative Machines presents human-robot interaction designer and researcher Patricia Alves-Oliveira.

This workshop address how robots can be used for unconventional tasks, such as being promotors of human creativity and artistic expression.

ESS launches a series of Virtual Happy “Hours” in 2025. These are curated 30ish-minute live Zoom events featuring special artist content, Creative Audio Archive selections, and a lively chat—no cameras required!

“Chicago Composers: the Next Generation” celebrates the work of composers in the Crossing Borders Music Young Composers Project. In the project, youth from music programs in North Lawndale and Garfield Park receive weekly composition lessons and write a piece for the Crossing Borders Music string quartet.

Learn how to map images onto audio signals and audio signals onto images in this PixelAudio Workshop led by Paul Hertz.

November 30th, 2024 7PM at The Fourtunehouse Art Center. A mute alien, who looks like an African American man, faces struggle when he is chased by two of his fellow aliens in order to bring him back to his planet.

Limited Seating Available

November 23rd, 2024 7PM at The Fourtunehouse Art Center. An interstellar traveler and musician lands on earth and duels with an evil overlord for the souls of people.

Richard Brasseale (saxophone) and Jonathan Hannau (piano) explore reflective musical works for saxophone and piano, including premieres by Brasseale and Hannau.

New Music Chicago presents a career development workshop series in collaboration with Resonator Arts , an NYC-based artist services organization dedicated to amplifying the voices of independent artists.

Paul Hertz presents new visual, audio, and intermedia works created with his new free, libre open source software library for Processing, PixelAudio.

This ensemble performance in Bond Chapel assembles a group of musicians who appeared on the original recordings, playing through the new works live as compositions for the first time and taking them as launchpads for further improvisation.

In this presentation, Hara Alonso will share some of the work she has been doing during her residency at ESS, extending the piano through preparations and modular synthesizers.

Explore the synthesis of code, sound and moving images in this multimedia presentation and demo with Lisa Glenn Armstrong.

Join us for a garage sale of epic proportions featuring synthesizers, DIY and boutique noisemakers, records, vintage A/V equipment, refreshments, performances and camaraderie galore.

Visda Goudarzi will teach creative coding with audio. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop to follow along.

Composers Xavier Beteta (Guatemala), Josh Rodriguez (Colombia), and Richard Scofano (Argentina), will offer three world premieres – a rich sonic feast presenting eclectic aesthetics that draw inspiration from classical, contemporary, and Latin American dance and folk music. A celebration of music by Chicago-based composers from Central and South America, this concert of new piano trio music performed by Stephen Uhl, Brian Ostrega, and Brian Gaona will also feature the bandoneon. 

Art as Civic Ritual is a Long-Table discussion, a participatory, non-hierarchical conversation for, with, and among the public about art making as a ritual for civic work, and a process for radical democracy. Featured guests  — artists, activists, and civic leaders Tonika Lewis Johnson, Faheem Majeed, Bindu Poroor, and Gibran Villalobos join the conversation to thicken and galvanize our dialogue.

Xadie James will explore their set up using triggers or contact microphones attached to drums. They will go through a step-by-step process of how to set up triggers using a Digital Audio Workstation, using anything you can attach to a microphone to make an instrument or play back found sounds.

Join us on October 5 for a collective action disseminating 600 lawn signs throughout Chicago as part of the multi-city counter campaign Exorcism = Liberation.

A panel discussion on multichannel sound work with Gabi Kinlock, Kim Nucci, Regina Martinez, and Beth Bradfish, moderated by ESS engineer Kate In.

Legendary sound collage group Negativland and “real-time cinema” visual artist SUE-C collaborate to bring you their latest audio-visual performance

This video documents a singular performance, which featured original images by Mazurek projected onto the Adler Planetarium’s domed ceiling and the Exploding Star Orchestra’s hypnotic interpretations of music from their album Lightning Dreamers (International Anthem, released 2024).