Composer • Musician • Educator
Music Software Developer
Composer and interdisciplinary artist Panaiotis composes for a wide range of genres, including theater, film, and dance. He also works with traditional and experimental media. Throughout his career he has invented technologies to create multidimensional works that engage audiences interactively. As a composer whose works have been performed throughout the US, Europe, and Japan, he toured worldwide as singer and performer of acoustic and computer assisted music.
Panaiotis earned his Ph.D in music at UC San Diego. He received his Master of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music and his Bachelor of Music degree from East Carolina University.
Panaiotis has written music for numerous plays including a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in Potsdam Germany and a full-length music and sound design for a puppet theater production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest for the Basler Marionetten Theatre in Basel, Switzerland.
Panaiotis wrote his first opera, The Akeda, while working on his Ph.D. at UC. San Diego. During that time he was the composer and sound designer for over two dozen theater productions. He received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1995 to write his second opera, The Traveling Companion.
Panaiotis lived in Central Florida from 1997-2002 where he taught World Music and electronic music at Stetson University and Rollins College. It was during this period that he collaborated with Indian santur performer Nandkishor Muley to produce their CD Rising Sun.
His extensive involvement with dance includes improvisation, live dance, and dance videos. The Swiss dance company Tanz Ensemble Cathy Sharp premiered his dance work The Ballad of Frankie Silver in Basel Switzerland, which they performed throughout Europe before giving its US premiere at the UGA Arts96 as part of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Athens, GA.
Panaiotis received a commission to create the dance work Awakening as part of an American Dance Festival residency. Through grants from the University of New Mexico, Panaiotis collaborated with visual and film artists Joyce Neimenas and Moira Speers-Ellis, and choreographer Jennifer Predock-Linnell to create over a dozen dance videos, improvisations, and dance concerts.
He also received a commission to create a multidimensional work, The Labyrinth, as part of a Music in Motion project with the Relâche Ensemble at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. The Labyrinth incorporated a 36 foot diameter canvas placed on the floor inlaid with the Chartres labyrinth design. Musicians and the audience walked its unicursal path with algorithmically generated music textures created in real-time as a background to the musicians who performed in a structured improvisation.
Panaiotis also created two film scores, The Kiss and Fugue State, and he created motion graphics promotional videos for Chamber Music Albuquerque.
As a founding member of the Deep Listening Band with Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis toured worldwide as a composer/singer, expanding performance of musical instruments with computer technology.
From 1988-1993 they performed throughout Europe, Japan and the US in such places as a 14 foot deep underground cistern at Fort Warden in Washington state, where the band recorded two CDs (Deep Listening and The Ready-made Boomerang), an underground limestone mine in upstate New York (Troglodyte’s Delight), a lava cave on the Canary Islands, and Panasonic Hall in Tokyo where, for a five hour marathon concert, he moved the music of his colleagues and ten Japanese artists through a configuration of 750 loudspeakers that were built into the walls and ceiling. Two of their CDs were chosen by The New York Times as among the top ten CDs of new music for their respective release years.
In 2000 Panaiotis began exploring the golden ratio 𝛗 and Fibonacci sequence to structure time in music composition. While there are examples of the golden ratio in music throughout music history, Panaiotis created a system that nests the ratio eight levels deep. He has composed over 20 works using this time structure.
In 2005 the Santa Fe Community Orchestra commissioned him to write a concerto for electronics and orchestra, which they premiered at the St. Francis Auditorium in Santa Fe, NM, June 2005 under the baton of Oliver Prezant. The concerto, Northern Lights, is a golden ratio work conceived as the journey of a solar flare that travels from the sun to the earth. The length of the music coincides with the time it takes for the light of a solar flare to reach earth from the sun.
Panaiotis has been engaged in the development of computer technology and programming for as long as he has been composing and performing music, and has been awarded patents for his technology solutions.
In 1988 he founded PanDigital Corporation to design and develop electronic performance hardware and software. Development included residencies at the Theater School for New Dance Development and STEIM (STudio for Electro Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta Canada, and The Center for New Music and Audio Technology at UC Berkeley. In 1994 he was granted a patent for his PanPaw, a three-dimensional continuous foot controller.
At this time he began development of his SoundCycler algorithmic music tool, which later became the basis for his recent research using music as a medium for analyzing complex data. Development of SoundCycler began as a tool to study harmony. Soon after he completed the first version it became clear that it was a versatile compositional tool. Much of his electronic music composed since then uses SoundCycler music textures to varying degrees. In addition, the kidney nephron music is algorithmically generated in real-time with SoundCycler. It is also the underlying basis for Bandojo.
Bandojo is a computer-based musical instrument designed to assist people with physical, cognitive, and musical challenges to easily create and perform music. It is designed for collaborative performance, with the software managing user interaction to maintain musical cohesion and musicality. One of the interactive Bandojo music systems was used in the Spinal Cord Injury Unit of the Raymond G. Murphy Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
From 2003 to 2008, Panaiotis served as a Research Assistant Professor in both the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Music at the University of New Mexico, where he developed VR-based data audio display systems that utilized algorithmically generated music to enhance the comprehension of large data sets and complex systems. He presented a paper on the subject at the 14th Annual Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR-14) conference.
Through various grants and as part of an interdisciplinary team, Panaiotis engaged in collaborative projects in the Visualization Laboratory at the Center for High Performance Computing at UNM. A notable project with Los Alamos National Laboratories involved network connection analysis.
Panaiotis also participated in the design of a decision support tool for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and presented a paper titled “Algorithmically Generated Music Enhances VR Decision Support Tool” at the Science and Technology for Chem-Bio Information Systems (S&T CBIS) Conference in October 2005.
As part of the Telehealth Outreach for Unified Community Health project, Panaiotis collaborated in the development of an interactive simulation of the kidney nephron’s filtration process. Initially conceived as an educational tool for medical education, this project was incorporated into the Art and Artifice of Science exhibition at the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts. Subsequently, it was presented at two medical conferences: the 8th Annual Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare and the 16th Annual Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR-16) conference. Panaiotis revised the simulation by creating a gamified version, which was utilized at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine to facilitate teaching of renal physiology.
He also taught cross-listed interdisciplinary classes in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Music, as well as in the Departments of Media Arts, Art and Art History, and the Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media program. Courses are related to algorithmic composition and interactive media systems.
Since 1998, Panaiotis has been giving private brass lessons: trumpet, french horn, trombone, and tuba, among others. He has written numerous etudes, arrangements, and works for his students.
