Voltage Connect 2017 Presenters
Voltage Connect featured these three keynote speakers, in addition to several conference presenters.
Keynote Speakers:
David Friend
Friday, March 10, 2017
9:30 a.m.–10:30 a.m.
David Friend has been a lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management and is an active supporter of music and the arts in Boston. He is a trustee (emeritus) of the New England Conservatory, Berklee College of Music, and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He is on the boards of several corporations, including netBlazr, Inc., FastPort, DealDash, AudioCommon, and Cyracom International.
Friend holds a bachelor's degree in engineering from Yale University and attended the Princeton University Graduate School of Engineering where he was a David Sarnoff Fellow. He is an avid marathoner, distance cyclist, windsurfer, and hiker.
Daniel Haver
Friday, March 10, 2017
2:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m.
Daniel Haver joined the founding team of Native Instruments in 1997 as a shareholder and managing director. As an avid fan of electronic music, he was fascinated both with the sonic possibilities of software synthesis and with the wider creative implications of audio software. As a passionate entrepreneur who had previously owned a media design studio in Hamburg, Germany, he also recognized the business potential of the emerging computer revolution in the musical instruments domain.
First, Haver outfitted Native Instruments with solid business structures and created a longterm marketing and distribution plan. A crucial element was the setup of U.S. representation in Los Angeles, which became Native Instruments North America, Inc., in 2002. Haver also guided the creation of a diversified portfolio, evolving the initial Reaktor software technology into the Komplete line of software instruments and effects, and initiating breakthrough products such as the digital DJ platform Traktor and the groove production system Maschine. His passion for industrial and graphical user interface (GUI) design also defined the distinctive look and feel of the company’s products, and his strong marketing background allowed him to define a highly distinctive brand that contributed to Native Instruments' unique status in the industry.
Today, Native Instruments is run by Haver as CEO and Mate Galic as president, and currently employs around 400 people in its offices in Berlin, Germany; Los Angeles, California; Tokyo, Japan; Shenzhen, China; and London, England. Haver remains the driving force behind all strategic decisions as well as a pursuer of a systematic expansion course on all fronts. His passion for sports challenges, which made him spend his teenage years on the motocross circuit, is nowadays realized in sporadic snowboarding, wakeboarding, and kite surfing trips.
Marcus Ryle
Saturday, March 11, 2017
2:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m.
Marcus Ryle, cofounder and president of leading music technology company Line 6, has been responsible for driving innovation in Line 6 products since its inception. He cofounded Fast Forward Designs in 1985, which developed groundbreaking products for Alesis, Digidesign, and other companies before evolving into the Line 6 brand in 1996. Prior to Fast Forward Designs, he was a design engineer for Oberheim, where he helped create several now-legendary analog synthesizers.
Ryle's long history and expertise in technology and product development have resulted in bestselling musical instrument and audio products in several categories, and the coinvention of 19 U.S. patents. In 2012, he was inducted into the first annual Keyboard Hall of Fame and the inaugural Guitar Player Hall of Fame. A classically trained pianist, Ryle has played keyboards and/or created sounds for several motion picture and television soundtracks as well as numerous professional recording artists including Barbra Streisand, Olivia Newton-John, Christopher Cross, Chicago, Chaka Khan, and Lee Ritenour.
Conference Presenters
Jonathan Bailey B.M. '08 is a technologist and musician with more than a decade of experience in building innovative products. As chief technology officer at iZotope, he leads the design, research, and development teams in the strategy, planning, and delivery for iZotope’s award-winning line of products, including Ozone, RX, Neutron, and Iris. He also works in close collaboration as part of iZotope’s executive leadership team to catalyze and drive organizational and personnel development within the fast-growing company.
Before joining iZotope, Bailey was chief technology officer at Curious Brain and lead developer at Sonik Architects. With degrees in computer science from Stanford University and electronic music production from Berklee College of Music, he also is a prolific performer and composer.

Athan Billias has spent most of his life with MIDI. In the early '80s, he was the sales manager at E.U. Wurlitzers in Boston and sold the Cars not only nine Roland Jupiter 8s, but the DCB-to-MIDI converters to go with them. He was the product planning manager for Korg, Inc. in Tokyo, Japan, from the Korg M1 (the largest selling synthesizer of all time) up until the release of Korg's first auto accompaniment keyboard (the i3) in 1993. After a year spent revoicing the Alesis QS8, creating the sound set that shipped with the Sega Saturn, and developing E-MU sampling libraries, he became the vice president of Ivl Multimedia and licensed MIDI-controlled vocal harmony technology to Yamaha, Brother, Ricoh, and Sega for their ISDN-network MIDI-based karaoke systems. In 1998, Billias joined Yamaha as the marketing manager for music production, and he has been involved with the product planning and voicing for every Yamaha synthesizer from the S80 to the Montage. He is currently the director of strategic product planning at Yamaha Corporation of America and has been on the executive board of the MIDI Manufacturers Association for 20 years.
Richard Boulanger, professor of electronic production and design at the Berklee College of Music (also known as Dr. B.), is an internationally recognized composer, performer, author, lecturer, developer, and the founder of Boulanger Labs. He holds a Ph.D. in computer music from the University of California, San Diego, where he worked at the Center for Music Experiment’s Computer Audio Research Lab. He has continued his computer music research at Bell Labs, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, Interval Research, IBM, and One Laptop per Child. Boulanger has appeared in and premiered his interactive orchestral and chamber music compositions at the Kennedy Center, the Seoul Opera House, the Beijing Central Conservatory, and Shanghai Symphony Hall; and his Radio Baton and PowerGlove Concerto was premiered by the Krakow and Moscow Symphonies. Boulanger’s Csound-based iOS apps include csGrain, csSpectral, and csJam. With BT, he has published a Csound-based app for the Leap Motion Controller called MUSE, and he recently composed and performed a major symphonic work built around these apps called Symphonic Muse. Boulanger has published articles on computer music education, production, and composition in all the major electronic music and music technology magazines; and for MIT Press, he has authored and edited two canonical computer music textbooks that are used around the world: The Csound Book and The Audio Programming Book. Among his many grants, Boulanger was a Fulbright professor at the Academy of Music in Krakow, Poland. At Berklee, where he has been teaching for over 30 years, he has won both the Faculty of the Year Award and the President’s Award.

Ramon Castillo has composed music for PUBLIQuartet, Gamelan Galak Tika, Alea III, Ensemble Robot, the Loud Objects, and various other ensembles and festivals. He has performed with artists such as the Kronos Quartet, Signal Ensemble, Wu Man, Terry Riley, and Gamelan Galak Tika.
As a full-time faculty member and associate chair of the Music Department at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, he teaches musicianship and music business, and directs several ensembles including the Contemporary Electronic Ensemble. He also works with a small team of faculty to overhaul the core musicianship curriculum. In addition, Castillo teaches composition part time at Berklee College of Music.
Castillo created the Bleep Blop Electroacoustic Ensemble to encourage young composers to become familiar with new musical media and experimental performance techniques. Bleep Blop has worked regularly with several domestic and international artists including Sandeep Das and NonDuo. Castillo has personally developed much of the technology (hardware and software) in use by the ensemble.

Clarke is a keen proponent of removing obstacles when creating music, making the experience easier for musicians while ensuring that they can maintain their creative flow.

Clepper studied film at the University of Texas and art and technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He taught technology to artists at SAIC and art to technologists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his current role in research and development at Eurorack synthesizer manufacturer Tiptop Audio, he has worked on products such as the Trigger Riot, Circadian Rhythms, and ONE. In his spare time, Clepper is the director of Art Technology New England, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering a community for technology artists through talks and workshops.

Crabtree and Cain have had their work shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in addition to numerous international performances. They live in upstate New York, where time is shared with apple orchards, shiitake stacks, and birds of all size, color, and song.


Ducceschi holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées (ENSTA), with a scholarship funded by École Polytechnique in Paris, on nonlinear vibration in plates. He is also part of Physical Audio, a company devoted to developing real-time physical modeling plugins.

An accomplished clarinetist, Egozy performs regularly with Radius Ensemble and Emmanuel Music, and freelances in the Boston area. He serves on the boards of several Boston-area nonprofit organizations and mentors and invests in several startups around the city. Before cofounding Harmonix, he earned degrees in electrical engineering and music from MIT, where he conducted research on combining music and technology at the MIT Media Lab. His current research and teaching interests include interactive music systems, music information retrieval, and multimodal musical expression and engagement.

Driven by a passion for audio, iZotope develops software that inspires and enables the creative community to achieve technical and artistic excellence. The company has spent more than 15 years developing audio production tools, focusing on music production, with solutions for mixing, mastering, and creative effects; and audio post production, with tools that enhance audio for film, broadcast, video, and new media.



When Galic came across Native Instruments' groundbreaking synthesis software, Generator, he was electrified by its vast creative implications and joined the company as shareholder in 1999. Since then, he became deeply involved in Native Instruments' product design and eventually played a crucial role behind many of the company’s product milestones.
As chief technology officer and president, Galic today steers the strategic direction with chief executive officer Daniel Haver and oversees the technological research, design, and development at Native Instruments. His mission is to further advance a paradigm of inspirational music technology that is profoundly innovative while remaining accessible to musicians of all backgrounds.


In the 1990s, Gee was a senior soundware engineer at Kurzweil, responsible for the factory voicing and MIDI touch response for acclaimed professional keyboards including the K2500 and PC-88, as well as digital pianos including the Ensemble Grand Mark 10. As an independent sound designer, he has worked with companies such as Synthogy and SONiVOX, helping to develop and voice software instruments. In 2008, he introduced the Kontakt-based instrument Plectrum, a collection of completely original acoustic instruments created from prepared instruments, found sounds, and natural environments.
Currently an international baccalaureate music instructor at the Long Trail School in Dorset, Vermont, Gee remains an active performer, composer, conductor, and sound designer based in upstate New York on a 95-acre farmstead, where he lives with his partner and their five children. Over the past year, he has been voicing sounds and generating strategies and techniques to exploit the extraordinary potential of the Roli Seaboard Rise five-dimensional keyboard controller.

Darwin Grosse lives at the intersection of art and technology. As an artist, he has provided sound, music, and visuals for movies, videos, dance, and musical performances. As a technologist, he has worked with the Cycling ’74 team for more than 15 years on the development of the Max programming language, and he's a longtime contributor to Recording Magazine. He has also been an active educator, teaching visual programming and sound art/design at the University of Denver through 2016, and conducting various classes and workshops throughout the 2000s.
Grosse’s current activities include a role as a collaborating digital artist with Third Law Dance Theater, a contributing author and product reviewer with Recording Magazine, and a performer with several music groups including THHG, NoPoem, and other solo and collaborative works. He is also the director of education and customer services with Cycling ’74, where he helps Max users become better at their work. Currently based in Northfield, Minnesota, Grosse continues developing his own performance system, including modular synthesizers, Arduino microprocessors, Monome interfaces, and Max running on many, many computers. He is an avid coffee drinker, which makes all the above possible.

In 1988, he invented the samchillian, a relativistic keyboard controller, for which he received a patent, and he subsequently began recording and performing with it worldwide with artists such as Vernon Reid, James Blood Ulmer, and many others. Gruenbaum has showcased his invention with his own projects including L.E.G. Slurp, Math Camp, and, most recently, with Genes and Machines, a band that features his compositions, vocals, and the samchillian.

Halaby has many years of composition and performance experience in the music industry, including several years with George Coates Performance Works, Gary Palmer Dance Company, ACT, and many other musical entities. He has performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; the Doolittle Theater in Los Angeles, California; and the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, California. He still performs with various groups in the Bay Area. Halaby holds a bachelor’s degree in art from Stanford University.



At Disney, he was senior producer of mobile for Disney Infinity and was part of the team that successfully launched a $1 billion franchise. Lehrich is a classically trained musician and a media technologist with an interest in production, controllerism, and interactive art. He currently works at Magic Leap.

Lehrman has served as a consultant for numerous hardware and software companies, including Apple, Digidesign, Kurzweil, Roland, Yamaha, JBL, AKG, and Passport Designs. In 1985, he was cocreator of the first graphics-oriented MIDI sequencer for the Apple Macintosh. In 1987, he created the computer music program at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Since 2000, he has been on the faculty of Tufts University, where he is director of the music engineering program, teaching courses in computer music and electronic musical instrument design, and directing the Tufts Electronic Music Ensemble.
In 1998, Lehrman was commissioned by music publisher G. Schirmer to create MIDI sequence files for performing the revolutionary 1924 George Antheil composition, “Ballet Mécanique,” and he has since produced more than 20 performances of the piece at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall, Davies Symphony Hall, London Festival Hall, and the National Gallery of Art.

Leslie completed her Ph.D. in music and cognitive science at the University of California at San Diego, where she studied the expressive movements and brain dynamics supporting music engagement at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. During the 2008–2009 academic year, she was a researcher at IRCAM in Paris. She has also worked on audio DSP and user experience design projects for Sennheiser and Motorola. She completed her undergraduate and master’s degree work in music, science, and technology at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University.
Jason H. J. Lim B.M. '13 is a Glasgow-based musician, creator and educator who works between the worlds of traditional musical instruments and experimental electronics. With a background in classical and contemporary music as a multi-instrumentalist, Lim graduated from the Electronic Production and Design Department at Berklee College of Music and then launched his first entrepreneurial startup, designing and building modular synthesizers in the Eurorack format. Under the branding “Instruō,” he now designs and releases his own range of analogue and digital instruments, which are used by musicians and artists worldwide. Instruō acts as both a branding and a stage name. Lim performs on stage and in the studio with an ever-evolving rig of customized modular synthesizers and controllers, combined with an array of electric and acoustic string and percussion instruments.
Along with synth development, performance, and studio work, Lim is now a part of a team of tutors at Scotland’s leading electronic music production studio, Shoogle Studios, where he teaches a program in sound design and audio synthesis.

History notes only a handful of artists who successfully pushed the limits, both with their music and with the design of their musical instruments. What Bach was to the keyboard and Hendrix was to the guitar, Moldover is to the controller. Disillusioned with "press-play DJs”, Moldover fans eagerly welcome electronic music’s return to virtuosity, improvisation, and emotional authenticity. Dig deeper into Moldover’s world, and you’ll uncover a subversive cultural icon who is jolting new life into physical media with "playable packaging,” sparking beautiful collaborations with his custom jamboxes and drawing wave after wave of followers with an open source approach to sharing his methods and madness.

Nathorst-Böös is the founder and chairman of Allihoopa, a social network that connects people, music content, and music apps. He was a founding member of the International Music Software Trade Association (IMSTA) and has certificates from Stanford Graduate School of Business, Ahrens University of Rapid Growth, and FEI Stockholm.

That's when O'Connell's Lyricon broke. A saxophone player for years, he once purchased a Lyricon wind controller along with MiniMoog and Oberheim SEM synthesizers. Apparently, the best person to repair his Lyricon was a guy from the Bronx—Sal Gallina. Gallina was consulting for Yamaha on the development of the WX7 at the time, and procured a couple of small firmware jobs from Yamaha for O'Connell before he got a full time position helping migrate the physical modeling work that CCRMA was doing to future Yamaha products.
O'Connell moved to California in 1989 to a group that eventually became Korg R&D. Subsequently, O'Connell started BitHeadz in 1997 doing commercial software synths for Macs and PCs. After another round with Korg R&D in 2004, he released some software synth under his own name for iOS in 2011. Currently, he is doing software and firmware development for a contract engineering firm in Rhode Island.


Pardo also composes music for games independently through the audio production house SkewSound. He studied at the University of Miami, where he received a bachelor’s degree in studio music and jazz, and a master’s degree in studio jazz writing. He lives in Boston with his wife, Amy, and two children.



A noted lecturer on the history of electronic musical instruments, his Ph.D. dissertation on the topic is cited in The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, in multiple entries in The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, and now in The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, Second Edition.
Rhea conceived, oversaw the development of, and wrote the first music for OxyLights, the world’s largest permanent music and light installation, as recognized in The Guinness Book of World Records. An artist in residence at the Institute for Electronic Arts in 2000 and 2001 at Alfred University, he explored the use of DVD technology for the presentation of film clips, with a focus on electronics in the soundtrack.

In the mid-1980s, Roos switched to guitar-controlled MIDI and began writing and producing music for television. He has scored hundreds of shows, including 15 seasons of the PBS series Scientific American Frontiers and several in the NOVA series. For the majority of his synthesis elements on these programs, he used MIDI guitar. His discography includes Photogenic Memory, three solo releases, and two with the group World News, with guitar-controlled synthesis featured on all of the albums.

Rosenthal was associate musical supervisor and synthesizer programmer for all four productions of the Tony Award–winning Broadway musical Movin’ Out. As synthesizer programmer, his credits include Joel, Bruce Springsteen, and Alicia Keys. As an orchestrator, his credits include Joel, Phil Ramone, Rainbow, and Yngwie Malmsteen. Other career highlights include many television shows, concert videos, and video clips; the Broadway production of A Tale of Two Cities; two Grammy nominations, and numerous gold and platinum albums.
Gadi Sassoon B.M. '04, a composer and producer from Milan, Italy, was composer in residency at the NESS Project. Known for bringing together traditional technique with the frontiers of sound synthesis and sound design, he is part of the Just Isn’t Music composer roster at Ninja Tune, and his compositions have been heard on television, movies, and games—most recently on NBC’s The Blacklist and Fox’s Pitch.
Sassoon has collaborated as a synthesist and producer with record labels such as Warner Music, Circus Company, and BBE. His musical alter egos include Memory9, a cult United Kingdom bass act, and the Infinity Orchestra, a neoclassical/electronic hybrid project, as well as a few undisclosed monikers. He holds a bachelor’s degree in music synthesis from Berklee College of Music and a master’s degree in sound arts from Middlesex University London.




In his own productions, Stearns pulls from a broad range of skills in the creation of multimedia performances that include live music, projection mapping, dance, visual art, and interactivity. Of particular interest to Stearns is using the world as a performance space by using internet streaming to coordinate numerous performers and audiences on different parts of the globe.

When not at work or at the golf course, Teele is singing and playing bass in various bands, providing live sound and live recording services, and doing studio recording and production. He has developed many of his own plugin effects, including room simulation reverb, a dynamic loudness compensation tool, and a profiling mastering tool.

Tibbs received a B.A. in film scoring from Berklee College of Music and an M.A. and Ph.D in composition from the University of California, Los Angeles. During these years, he also continued his commercial writing and performance pursuits outside academia.
Tibbs's music and orchestrations have been performed (conducted by him) by the London Symphony Orchestra, Hollywood Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, and Polish National Radio Orchestra, not to mention nearly every session orchestra in Hollywood, California. From BET to the Grammys, from television’s One Tree Hill to commercials and film trailers, his music is everywhere in today’s media.
Scott has amassed a large body of music with numerous recording artists such as Beyoncé, Mary J. Blige, Howard Jones, Bruce Springsteen, Nelly, and Lil’ Wayne, among many others.


Three years later, he left Eventide to found Manifold Labs and lead development of Plugzilla, the world’s first dedicated plugin player. He continues in a consulting role with Eventide, championing the company’s successful entry into the guitar effects market. Throughout his career, he has composed, performed, and recorded music, including several records as the artist Frattura Waltz. For the past decade, he has collaborated with Leon Gruenbaum in building a family of innovative keyboard instruments.