Alumni

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leon Senger is a drummer, improvisor and sound artist.
Born 1995 in Wiesbaden, Germany, Senger grew up in Eltville am Rhein. In 2020, he completed his bachelor's degree in Jazz & Pop at the ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem (NL). There he discovered his love for improvised music and the exploration of sounds, among other things in lessons with Etienne Nillesen.

Probably equally important was the opportunity to follow a 2-year Honours Programme next to the Bachelor degree that focused on artistic research in the interdisciplinary environment at ArtEZ. After graduating, Leon focused on developing an electroacoustic solo performance based on the feedback tones of an amplified resonating drum.
Having returned to the Rhine-Main region, it was precisely this music that led him to the New Jazz Cooperative in Wiesbaden, which runs the "art.ist" concert space there.

Since October of 2021 he has been following the Master Klangkunst-Komposition at HfM Mainz in order to expand his artistic practice beyond pure instrumentalism. Here he investigated the sounds of drawing and painting and what aspects of these artistic expressions lay in their sonic qualities that do not completely show in their visual products.
In his sound art work, he consciously adopts the starting position that he does not act as a creative spirit and sole starting point in the creative process, but is in a constant improvising exchange with his environment or his material - be it in resonance or dissonance. This connects his various projects, which can range from "automatic drawings" and their sonic aspects to an examination of geological phenomena. In 2022 he was a scholarship holder at the 8th international winter campus of the artists' town of Kalbe.

He graduated in Master Soundart-Composition in Spring 2024 with his work UnTod – Leise sprechen die LautSprecher in the artist in Wiesbaden.

https://www.leon-senger.net/

Leon Senger auf soundcloud
Video
Vimeo

Juan David Bermúdez is a Colombian sound artist, composer, and music producer. His work as an artist revolves around the relationships between sound, space, and time and how to experience existence through sound. Juan David has a Music bachelor degree with emphasis on Sound engineering from the Javeriana University, finishing his studies with academic honors in 2018. His sound installations have been exhibited in Matik-Matik, Biblioparque Marqués de San Jorge, Javeriana University and Espacio Odeón. Since 2018, he has been part of the experimental music ensembles Time Canvases and Indemo that perform and compose music in non-conventional settings, hoping to create experiences in which the music becomes part of everyday situations.

He studied for a Master of Music in Sound Art Composition at the Mainz University of Music under Peter Kiefer, Stefan Fricke and Andres Bosshard, graduating with top marks in October 2023.
He has been a master student in the Sound Art Composition class since summer semester 2024 - see here: https://soundart.uni-mainz.de/2024/05/17/juan-david-bermudez-meisterschuler/

https://www.juanbermudez.net

Wingel Pérez Mendoza was born in Mexico City (1982). He got the Trinity College Bachelor degree in composition in 2009, later he studied at Rotterdam Conservatory with Robin de Raaff (composition Professor) and Rene Uijlenhoet (Electronic music Professor) in The Netherlands in which he got the Master degree in composition in 2014. Later, he studied his Meisterklasse Komposition in the Hochschule für Musik Würzburg in Germany with Professor Robert HP Platz. He is studied the Master's program Klangkunst Komposition in the Hochschule für Musik Mainz with Prof. Peter Kiefer and Prof. Ancke Exckardt.

For Wingel, the sound is a material that is made not only by sonic energy, but it is made with images, memories, lights, movements, actions like touching, thinking. Therefore, my personal interest as a composer and sound artist is to expand the context of sound interacting with external sources such as electronic means (live electronics, video, space [sound environment and the interaction with nature], image, movement, sensors) and also the interaction with other arts such as dance and/or Theatre, in order to create new possibilities and new ways of perception. Moreover, I improvise and perform with different devices (digital and analog) as a part of sound practice. Finally, as an exploration, I create my own analog devices or digital instruments in order to find new sources of sounds.

Website links:

Soundcloud

Youtube

Webpage

Danbi Jeung was born in 1991 in Seoul, South Korea. She studied musical instrumental- and electronic composition in Seoul and Hanover (Germany). Since 2019, she has been studying composition and sound art at the University of Music Karlsruhe and HfM Mainz.

Her works have been performed and exhibited by various ensembles and in several places such as Ensemble Harmony, Trio Surplus, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Ensemble cross.art in Seoul, Karlsruhe, Bremen, Lüneburg, Hanover, and Fulda, etc. In her work, she deals with the combination of sounds, plays, and text, and uses new scene phenomena.

Website Click

Born and raised in Ahwaz, Iran, the grounding for her work lies in the deep understanding of the sonic aspects of language, human speech, and the possibility of inducing visual perception through aural data. As an artist, she is interested in walking between the line of extreme and subtle. The subtle can carry extreme messages and the extreme can have subtle nuances.

Her walking this line is in many cases meant literal. She’s using herself as a subject to explore the individual suffering of humans and how to overcome it. Given her musical background, sound has been for a long time not only her primary but my only media. Recently she has reached a point where she started to feel the need to use visual aspects like photos, videos, and live performances as complementary layers in her projects.

Website link

Student from 2018-2020

Christopher Dahm (*1983/Kirchheimbolanden) lives and works in Mainz, Germany. After working as a techno DJ for many years, he studied sound and music production in Darmstadt (with Dr. Barbara Lüneburg, Moritz Bergfeld and Carsten Kümmel), as well as sound art composition at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (with Anke Eckardt, Peter Kiefer and Stefan Fricke). Christopher Dahm's installations and sculptures focus on the transformation of architecture and physical phenomena into the medium sound. In the process, space itself becomes a decisive component of the mostly site-specific works. A further focus of his work is artistic research on digital, multi-channel sound worlds, which are used in the field of Expanded Realities or in multimedia room installations. In the Department of Design at the Mainz University of Applied Sciences, he passes on his knowledge to students as manager of the media laboratories.

Christopher Dahm has been appointed for the WS 2022/23 as Professor of Digital Technologies in Moving Image & Sound at the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden.

We congratulate him warmly!

https://www.hs-rm.de/de/hochschule/personen/dahm-christopher

 

Ketevan Dolnikova-Hahn is a Georgian-Russian sound artist, composer and musician. She studied linguistics in Moscow and sound art and composition in Mainz with Professor Peter Kiefer.
Under the pseudonym Ketty van Doln she is known as a singer and performer in the electronic music scene.

Most recently she exhibited at the festival OPENING 2021 Klanglinie Trier in the Galerie Netzwerk in Trier in July/ August as a sound art alumni and part of the Mainz exhibition project.
Dreams become numbers (2021)
forms, stamp, sound composition, performance
In her sculptural sound installation "Dreams become numbers" Ketevan Dolnikova-Hahn deals with the wishes and dreams of people that are restricted or prevented by machine-like bureaucracy.
The sound installation consists of several objects that interlock in terms of content.
interlock with each other. The wishes and dreams of people are
symbolized by shredded forms and official applications,
which are deposited on a pile. A collage is stamped on one wall, referring to the origins of the wishes and dreams. The sound recordings made while stamping and destroying the quasi-official papers are combined and played in a composition.

https://www.ketevanhahn.com/works/soundart
https://www.kettyvandoln.de/

Foto: Nicola Hein

Nicola L. Hein (*1988 in Düsseldorf) is a guitarist, sound artist, composer, and researcher in music and aesthetics. He plays the guitar with physical and electronic extensions, aiming to transcend existing sonic paradigms. As a sound artist and composer, he works with sound installations, instrument building, conceptual composition and integrates philosophical theories into his artistic practice. Intermedia works with video art, dance, literature and other art forms constitute another focus of his practice. With the support of the Goethe Institute and many other institutions, his artworks have been realized in more than 30 countries worldwide. He has worked with many of the world's most established musicians in the field of improvised music. Furthermore, he works as a researcher in the field of aesthetics and gives lectures at different institutions around the world.
He studied Sound Art Composition 2015 - 2018 with Prof. Peter Kiefer at School of Music at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany and completed his Master of Music in 2018.
Currently he is PhD Student in Music Theory at Columbia University New York

Nicola L. Hein