Max Burstyn

New Classical

Max is a Master's graduate from the Royal Academy of Music with a Distinction in the degree of Music Composition, and he completed his BMus degree, also in Composition, at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. He has composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, and vocal chamber groups.

 

He often uses data sonification (turning numbers and graphs into sounds), which form the conceptual and musical bases for many of his works. For example his most recent work for the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra - Neurodynamics - was written using fMRI data and superimposing it onto the layout of the orchestra, so that the orchestra would light up like a brain in response to stimuli.

 

Other works of his which explore sonification include Goodbye Species, which uses the extinction rates of various fauna to sonically represent species' decline due to human activity, Chaos which uses randomly generated strings of numbers, and Molecular Music which assigns pitches to all the elements in the periodic table and creates musical-chemical reactions.