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(b New Britain, CT, 1952). American video, new media, and sound artist, electroacoustic composer, and guitarist. Educated at the Eastman School of Music (BM), the Hartt School at the University of Hartford (MM), and the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati (DMA), Gwiazda is now professor of composition and music theory at Minnesota State University in Moorhead, Minnesota. Early in his career he composed for orchestra and electric guitar, securing performances by the New Britain Symphony, the American Dance Festival, and others.

In 1986 he turned to electroacoustic music, performing throughout the United States and Europe on sampler, guitar, and tape. In the tradition of musique concrète, Gwiazda’s collage-like pieces emphasized the musical potential inherent in environmental sounds and other so-called noises. In 1992 he began working with virtual audio: the use of sound to simulate immersive, three-dimensional spaces. His 1994 installation buzzingreynold’sdreamland uses a precise configuration of speakers to give the listener the impression of being inside a bowl of sound (Gwiazda’s sampled, vocal, and guitar sounds). ...

(b Madison, WI, 1979). American sound artist, installation artist, electronic composer, laptop performer, and visual artist. Based in Los Angeles, he has collaborated with Will Long, Mise_En_Scene, and Marc Manning, among others, and exhibited and performed throughout the United States and Europe. He owns and operates Dragon’s Eye Recordings, which promotes promising but under-recognized sound artists and composers.

Novak’s installations, along with his electronic compositions and performances, typically consist of quiet, subtly shifting textures. These sounds are often field recordings of environmental sounds, digitally transformed into exquisite drones or slow-moving melodies, as in +ROOM (2009). Novak’s work is often associated with Ambient music, demonstrating the fluid, and indeed questionable, nature of the boundary between music and field recording or, generally speaking, between music and sound art. However, unlike ambient music, Novak’s pieces are often programmatic. The goal, in many of his works, is to transform documentation into narrative by digitally altering prerecorded sounds and images. His alterations often consist not of fleshing out sounds and images by adding to their characteristics, but of digitally erasing their distinguishing features. He may obliterate the movement that we typically see in video, reducing it to a static expanse of color. Similarly, he alters environmental sounds beyond recognition into contemplative textures....