Owen Vallis, Ph.d.

Owen Vallis is a machine learning software engineer, a co-founder of Kadenze, and was a Professor of Music Technology at the California Institute of the Arts, MTIID (Music Technology: Interaction, Intelligence, and Design program). Additionally, as a co-founder of Flip-Mu, he explored and designed open-source musical interfaces, real-time data sonification, generative audio/visual systems, and large-scale multitouch surfaces. With Jordan Hochenbaum and Jasmin Ruiz Blasco, he founded The Noise Index in 2014, a research platform to explore questions emerging from increased access to information and information saturation, with installations in New York, London, Paris, and L.A.

Owen received his Ph.D. in 2013 at the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington. During his graduate research, he focused on developing new musical interfaces, interactive musical agents, and large networked music ensembles including The Machine Orchestra. Over the past 10 years, he has: worked as a research scientist for Twitter; developed multi-touch interfaces for Nokia research labs; worked for leading ribbon microphone manufacturer Royer Labs; has had musical production featured in major motion films; designed and built recording facilities; and produced, engineered, and mixed records in Tokyo, Nashville, and Los Angeles. Owen’s work has been featured in Wired, Future Music, Pitchfork, XLR8R, Processing.org, computer arts magazine, and shown at events such as NASA’s Yuri’s Night, Google I/O, and the New York Cutlog art festival.