Tuned to B♭1. Across for pitch, down for chaos. Every line and heading on the page is an instrument.
Hum or sing a steady note: every letter and string that shares its harmonics rings along with you.
Chris ColatosChrisColatos
EdD(c) · MSc · ACT · FHEA
Algorithmic Composition
Biography
116.5 Hz
Academic executive, interdisciplinary artist, and creative technologist.
Serving as Vice President for Academic Affairs at San Francisco School of Creative Arts and Chief Creative at THE STUDI/O. Previous leadership roles include Chief Learning Officer, Chief Learning and Development Officer, Director of Education, and North America Director of Learning Design. Led academic and creative teams, developed institutional strategies, and directed educational initiatives reaching thousands of learners worldwide.
Producer, engineer, composer, and performer, with work across music, games, interactive media, and immersive technologies. Artistic practice spans traditional and experimental composition, music production, adaptive and interactive sound design, creative coding, and intermedia art, with a particular interest in developing technologies that enable new forms of creative expression.
Pursuing a doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, researching Human+AI co-intelligence in creative and educational contexts. MSc in Digital Education from the University of Edinburgh, with additional studies at Teachers College, Columbia University; Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA); and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Engagement with artificial intelligence began in 2006 through symbolic AI-based music composition and has evolved to encompass generative AI, intelligent creative systems, and human-machine collaboration. Also serving on the advisory board of an AI company and contributing as an expert to machine learning platforms.
Academic leadership grounded in evidence-informed teaching and a commitment to accessibility and inclusion. Professional distinctions include Fellow of Advance HE, 28 Apple Certified Master Trainer certifications, and nine U.S. Department of Homeland Security certifications in digital accessibility.
Spent years at Tarpan Studios working closely with Narada Michael Walden, a multi-GRAMMY, Emmy, and multi-Platinum producer and artist with 57 #1 hits and one of Billboard Magazine's "Top Ten Producers of All Time."
"A man for all seasons...from Ahmad Jamal to the hippest in contemporary music, Chris knows how it's done...a whiz with the computer and the drums. Chris has the genius touch."
Narada Michael Walden
Professional creditsElton John, Billy Joel, Katy Perry, Sting, James Taylor, Carole King, Smokey Robinson, PSY, Siedah Garrett, Greg Phillinganes, Scientist (dub pioneer), Apple, Google, Vogue, GQ, Salvatore Ferragamo, LeapFrog, PETA, Twisted Tools, Robot Invader, Honor Code, Eagre Games, Legends The Game
My teaching philosophy has developed through more than two decades of teaching experience and continuous reflection. I employ interactive strategies and teaching methodologies rooted in essential educational and knowledge-acquisition principles encompassing cognitive functioning, learning theory, instructional planning, and assessment. As a dedicated educator and academic leader, an influential educator must refine the craft of teaching with as much resolve and persistence as the craft taught. Teaching is an art that requires a vast and diverse skill set. Not only does it require a mastery of the subject, but also an ability to inspire, identify, and provide relevant context, deconstruct large frameworks, articulate complex ideas in unassuming ways, illustrate connections between insulated and modular concepts, possess a keen sensitivity to students' progress, consistently model industry practices, devise and nimbly adapt dissemination strategies to guide learners, create opportunities for students to discover for themselves, and facilitate experiences that foster curiosity.
Intellectual Diversity
I nurture intellectual diversity, the ability to think analytically, engage in critique, listen critically, identify and articulate criteria and personal value, and synthesize concepts and processes into new ideas and combinations of ideas. How a learner achieves these is likely unique to each individual. Often, learners select, interpret, and transform new information and experiences within a personal context. Simultaneous awareness of the individual and the collective group is an elemental responsibility. I have found that a genuine connection with each student is one of the most informative and supportive resources. This connection allows a teacher to identify a learner's door into the discourse and incorporate a learner's perspective and processes to facilitate contact with the material, spark inspiration, and reveal alternative approaches for fellow students. Each person brings an intrinsic value to the learning space; identifying what that is and utilizing that knowledge can benefit the group.
Student Engagement
Student engagement has proven vital in facilitating active discovery in the classroom. I endeavor to be an empathetic and encouraging advisor and mentor to my students. I work to create a space where every learner is empowered to contribute to constructing knowledge, co-own, share, and shape the responsibility and purpose of the learning environment. I encourage students to constructively challenge what they know and are taught and identify, experiment with, modify, or abandon existing philosophies to pursue meaning and value for themselves. Their contribution often leads to new trajectories along relevant paths that may have yet to be traversed as effectively or dynamically without their involvement. The class must meet the learning objectives of the course, and a skillful instructor can facilitate the benchmarks within a collaborative and shared space while strengthening abilities for autonomous and divergent cogitation.
Play, Trust & Structure
Fostering play, humor, and fun in the discovery process is as essential to flow as structure and trust. We can cultivate trust by demonstrating that there is a clear plan for students, that there is at least one path for them to be successful amid course criteria, that those paths are made evident, and that their teacher is someone who provides support, insight, and guidance on that path. Clarity of course structure is vital. A student's time is better spent without deciphering expectations, jumping through hoops, or seeking obscure resources. Of course, there is value in an ability to problem-solve and unearth resources when engaged in study and research; however, providing resources in accessible and manageable packages can provide measured guidance and elucidate criteria for success. This structural simplicity allows students to apply their time to contemplate, practice, develop, and engage with the intended material.
Assessment & Feedback
Important resources include plainly defined and apposite assessments and timely feedback. I continually refine formative and summative assessments to more accurately measure students' cognitive proficiency and affective engagement with course objectives, utilizing an integrative process, one of evaluation facilitated by reflection and practical integration, and the efficacy of its application in the next iteration of a task, course, or program. Assessments are intended to be useful, provide meaningful information for the learner and the teacher, be fair, ethical, systematic, challenging, realistic, promote learning, and empower data-driven approaches to guide the teaching and learning practice. I consider consistency in feedback practices integral to assessment and reciprocal teaching and learning. Feedback includes dialog between teachers and students, self-assessment, and peer assessment to develop assessment literacy and support students' growth as autonomous learners with reflective and evaluative skills and frameworks for working and improving collaboratively. Consistently structured principles of feedback can increase coherency and help learners utilize feedback to understand better task compliance, quality, criteria, core practice knowledge, relevant tacit knowledge, and alignment with personal and professional values.
Commitment
My enthusiasm and dedication to teaching and learning continue to grow, and I hope my work benefits learners and connects them with their passion and lifelong learning. It is an honor and a commitment that I undertake with seriousness and gratitude that I am able to support learners in their academic and professional endeavors.
All five compositions share a single engine: a recreation of Xenakis's Dynamic Stochastic Synthesis in a Web Audio API AudioWorklet.
In Suspended Harmony
A 6:47 composition for 20 DSS voices revealing the overtone series of a single B♭ fundamental. Partials 1 through 16 emerge across nine harmonic regions, building from a bare octave to full spectrum before dissolving back to the fundamental, altered by a ghost of the 15th partial.
Lemniscate
A 6:47 realization of DSS with no key, no scale, and no harmonic plan. Twenty voices are defined only by frequency barriers in raw Hz. The random walk determines every pitch. Consonance is a statistical event.
Gendy c2
A 6:47 sparse realization faithful to Xenakis's GENDY3. Only one to five voices play at any moment, exposing each waveform mutation as a naked, audible event rather than burying it in texture.
Chiaroscuro
An 8:08 composition modulating through six tonal centers (B♭, F, E♭, Gm, Dm, A♭) across twelve regions. Four voice classes rotate leadership, eleven asymmetric breath-swells shape the dynamics, and Cauchy bursts punctuate harmonic shifts as structural events.
Ergodic
A 9:37 composition built on durational structure rather than harmonic structure. No tonal center. Twenty voices span 18 Hz to 14 kHz, untethered from harmonic function; frequency spread itself becomes compositional material, narrowing to near-pure tones in silence and exploding beyond defined ranges during twin eruptions. Twelve sections follow Fibonacci-adjacent proportions across 577 seconds (prime). Stochastic parameters reach extremes no other piece in the collection touches: full Cauchy distribution, maximum walk rates, density from a single sub-bass voice to all twenty at once. The form is symmetrical: void to void, with two violent climaxes separated by a shattering collapse.
All five compositions share a single engine: a recreation of Xenakis's Dynamic Stochastic Synthesis in a Web Audio API AudioWorklet. Breakpoints evolve at sample rate via Gaussian and Cauchy random walk with reflecting barriers. Stochastic parameters are themselves subject to second-order random walk. Signal chain: DSS voices, tanh saturation, 12-second convolution reverb, shimmer delay. No samples. No oscillators. Every sound is generated from arithmetic on breakpoint arrays.
Browser-based generative composition engine that writes voiced, phrased, and cadenced music across jazz, classical, electronic, and song idioms, builds the rhythm under it, then lets you reshape it.
Browser-based generative composition engine that writes voiced, phrased, and cadenced music across jazz, classical, electronic, and song idioms, builds the rhythm under it, then lets you reshape it. Five linked views: a piano-roll Composer Map with chord cards and a live harmonic-tension trace, a Harmonic Orbit of chord substitutions ranked by shared tones, a Voice Loom for voice-leading edits, a Field that lays the generative layer across the whole passage, and a Drum Room whose break engine writes the groove across more than fifty styles, steered by chaos, ornament, and polymeter. Temperament sliders for risk, color, motion, and spread, six one-tap harmonic transformations, and motif-based melody development. Two traditions of algorithmic composition run side by side. Learn is symbolic AI in the lineage of David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence: it ingests your own MIDI, infers key by Krumhansl-Schmuckler profile correlation, separates voices by onset clustering, distills recurring motifs, and builds a first-order Markov model of chord-root motion, then composes fresh music in that style by rule rather than imitation. Process is its formal counterpart, six layered generative engines: Euclidean rhythm, cellular automata, L-systems, Markov chains, Xenakis-style stochastic distributions, and parametric curves, each with its own live visualizer, every note locked to the sounding chord. Multi-track Standard MIDI File export, OfflineAudioContext WAV rendering, and sample-accurate scheduling on the Web Audio clock. Route live Web MIDI, each part on its own channel, to your synths or a DAW to hear it at full resolution.
Browser-based generative drum instrument that fuses sample-based breakbeat manipulation with algorithmic pattern synthesis.
Browser-based generative drum instrument that fuses sample-based breakbeat manipulation with algorithmic pattern synthesis. STFT-based onset detection and adaptive classification split any uploaded break into kicks, snares, ghost notes, and hats. A chaos engine performs progressive structural transformations through per-voice step swaps, half-bar mirroring, bar rotation, cross-voice substitution, and stutter injection, exposing the instrument's compositional logic as a continuously tunable parameter space. Twelve time signatures including odd and compound meters. Eleven-voice mixer with solo/mute, pan, faders, and real-time VU metering. Sidechain ducking, comb filter, bitcrush, 4x oversampled tanh drive. Click-and-drag velocity editing per cell. Standard MIDI File export, OfflineAudioContext WAV rendering, live Web MIDI output. Sample-accurate scheduling locked to the Web Audio clock.
Nine-channel tracker-style step sequencer and synthesizer running entirely in the browser.
Nine-channel tracker-style step sequencer and synthesizer running entirely in the browser. No samples. Every kick, snare, bass, and pad is synthesized live from oscillators, noise, and waveshaping via the Web Audio API. Five drum and four melodic channels, each with multiple synthesis variants, variable time signatures including odd meters, grid resolutions to 1/256, swing, delay, and convolution reverb. Per-note probability and Elektron-style trig conditions. Pattern variants (A/B/C/D) assignable per bar. A preset library of 135 rhythms across 18 genres, from the jungle breaks to breakcore, techno, IDM, and artist references (Aphex Twin, Venetian Snares, Autechre, Squarepusher). Copy/paste bars, per-channel pattern shift, one-level undo, and autosave to browser storage. Sample-accurate scheduling locked to the Web Audio clock, Web Worker-driven background playback, Standard MIDI File export, and live Web MIDI output to external hardware and software. Two UI skins, including a retro OctaMED tribute.
Sound made visible. A single-file browser instrument in three journeys.
Sound made visible. A single-file browser instrument in three journeys. Foundations: thirteen stations for anyone starting out, from frequency and amplitude, phase and timbre through a five-band parametric EQ whose curve is read back from the running filters, the ear's own sensitivity, masking and precedence, a frequency-recognition trainer that adapts to the listener, a sample-by-sample converter with audible aliasing and dither, gain staging with a computed noise floor, a room whose modes and boundary notch follow its dimensions, a compressor, polar patterns with the proximity effect derived from the pressure gradient, reverb and width on a goniometer, and loudness metering with exact ITU-R BS.1770 K-weighting; your own audio or microphone can be the source. Ratio: eight stations on interval, resonance and the ear, from Lissajous figures drawn from the exact phases of the sounding tones to a Matter station that solves the free square and circular Kirchhoff plates from first principles, matching the published tables to four digits, with powder settling on the nodal lines and Faraday waves in a dish of water. Synthesis: nine playable stations from the subtractive voice through FM with Bessel sideband prediction, wavetable, additive, granular, and a Karplus-Strong string in an AudioWorklet, played from the screen, the keyboard, or Web MIDI. Plain-language and physics notes on every station, audio that keeps time in the background, no samples, no dependencies.
Music theory for people who make music. A single-file browser app in thirteen stops that follow a producer's path: Pitch, Intervals, Scales, Modes, Pentatonic, Triads, Sevenths, Progressions, Beyond (borrowed chords, secondary dominants, passing diminished), Melody, Rhythm, Form, and Ear. Every stop pairs a playable keyboard and piano roll with demonstrations you can stop and restart, loops that keep playing while you change the tonic, scale, voicing, chords, or layers, and forty-three adaptive drills across 121 levels that step up and down with your streak. Whatever is sounding lights the keys, from a demonstration, a loop, a drill, or your own hands, on the screen, the computer keyboard, or Web MIDI with per-device sustain, octave stacking, and scale lock. Keys, pad, bass, and drums are synthesized in the browser (no samples), with click-free envelopes, a transport that swaps patterns at the next beat, and tempo changes quantized to the beat. Melody is a sixteen-step roll with motif operations (repeat, sequence, invert, shift) and live non-chord-tone analysis. Rhythm is a step sequencer with hi-hat subdivisions down to sixteenth triplets, swing on either grid, humanize, bass line, polyrhythms, and eleven genre beats with ghost notes and open hats. Form is a section timeline with layers, fills, risers, and silence before a drop, played as a preview or at full length. A Reference holds the circle of fifths, key signatures, intervals, chord formulas, modes, progressions, drum charts, and a glossary. Screen-reader key mirror, keyboard-operable grids and circle of fifths, reduced-motion support.
A playable recreation of the 1978 arcade original, with every sound left for you to make.
A playable recreation of the 1978 arcade original, with every sound left for you to make. Thirty-one game events, from the four-note alien march and the saucer's loop to pause, menus, and a shot that reaches the top of the screen, each with an empty slot: name a file after the event, drop it in, and it plays in the game in real time. The ten sounds the original board actually had are marked; the four events it left silent are marked too. Rehearsal controls summon a saucer, clear a wave, or take a life so any moment can be heard on demand, and a sound check auditions every event in order. A one-bar step sequencer voiced with square waves and noise supplies the music: pattern A for winning, pattern B for losing, with the game's tension deciding which plays, how much percussion is heard, and how fast, switching only on the bar line. Per-event volume in dB, a peak meter with clip hold, and sound packs that save the whole set as one file.
Effects of Multimedia on Learning Efficacy and Cognitive Load. This research was conducted and authored by Chris Colatos as part of a collaborative study between The University of Edinburgh and Columbia University, supervised by preeminent scholars in the field, Professors Ryan S. Baker (Penn GSE) and Dragan Gašević (Monash University)
Interactive Audio student project: Sign And Speak is a prototype accessibility tool that converts American Sign Language into spoken word. Creators: Jeff Andrews, Michael Carter.
Interactive Audio student project: Sign And Speak is a prototype accessibility tool that converts American Sign Language into spoken word. Creators: Jeff Andrews, Michael Carter. #AlgorithmicProcessing #GestureRecognition #AssistiveTech #HCI #RealTimeProcessing #DigitalSignalProcessing #MaxMSP #CreativeCoding #InteractiveAudio #ComputationalLinguistics #SensorFusion #WearableTech #Arduino #EmbeddedSystems #HumanCenteredDesign #AccessibilityTech #TangibleInterfaces #DataMapping
Your visit, written as a graphic score: the pitch you steered, every string, letter, and bell you played, and anything you sang. Draw on it to add voices of your own, then play the whole piece or save it as audio.
