Ali Balighi
Composer · Electroacoustic Musician · Educator
"Where Persian microtonality meets serialism, algorithms and spatial sound."
Ali Balighi is a composer, electroacoustic musician and educator, born in Tehran. He is pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in Music Composition at Texas Tech University, where he serves as a Graduate Part-Time Instructor. He is a selected artist of Phantomnesis, the international call from Cambiata Arts, and his work appears in the compilation Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls.
Balighi graduated from The University of Art in Tehran in 2011 with a Bachelor's degree in Music Performance. A passion for composition led him to a Master's degree in Composition at Texas Tech University. His work includes acoustic, live electronic and fixed media compositions. His practice involves spatial audio, algorithmic composition, and the meeting of Persian microtonality, specifically the traditional Dastgah modal system, with contemporary serialism and electroacoustic techniques. His research explores animated and graphic notation, creative coding, and the integration of artificial intelligence into music creation and score generation. He also incorporates physical computing and interactive instrument design into his performances.
HHis catalogue consists of compositions for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, full orchestra and multichannel electronic formats, including Ambisonics. His works have been performed in North America, Europe, Asia and South America. Venues include the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) at MIT, the Tehran International Electronic Music Festival, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF), NoiseFloor UK, the Sonic Matter festival in Zurich and the SPAM New Media Festival. He has worked with ensembles including Sputter Box, Lawrence University New Music Ensemble, Beltline Bones, Omni Quartet and TellTale Opera Theatre.
His honours include the ICMC-MIT Special Call for Scores (2025), a funded residency at the Saari Residence by the Kone Foundation in Finland, and prizes at the Reza Korourian Awards for Electroacoustic Music and the Tehran International Electronic Music Festival. He serves as Artistic Director of the Gilgamesh Arts & Culture Foundation. His professional memberships include the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), the International Computer Music Association (ICMA), ASCAP and the Millennium Composers Initiative.
His academic writing appears in peer-reviewed journals including Organised Sound (Cambridge), Computer Music Journal (MIT Press), Perspectives of New Music, New Sound and Emille. It covers topics from spatial listening to AI in creative authorship. His music is released on labels including Noise à Noise, Post Orientalism Label and RKC, in projects such as his recurring Electropoem series, Zone 19 and Dastgah. He has also composed soundtracks for short films and is a published author of creative writing and poetry.
Highlights
Phantomnesis selected artist, Cambiata Arts; Featured in the compilation Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls (2026)
ICMC-MIT Special Call for Scores (2025)
Funded residency at the Saari Residence, Kone Foundation, Finland
Prizes at the Reza Korourian Awards for Electroacoustic Music and the Tehran International Electronic Music Festival
Performed at ICMC (MIT), NYCEMF, NoiseFloor UK, Sonic Matter (Zurich) and the SPAM New Media Festival
Published in Organised Sound, Computer Music Journal, Perspectives of New Music and New Sound
Artistic Director, Gilgamesh Arts & Culture Foundation
Member of SEAMUS, ICMA, ASCAP and the Millennium Composers Initiative
Selected works
Dastgah: Algorithmic Explorations of Persian Microtonality and Serialism, a 17-tone serial work derived from the Dastgah system
Electropoem series, for multichannel fixed media (including Nos. 12 and 14, for 4 channels)
Metanomad, for 3rd-order Ambisonics
Saz-o-Dohol, for clarinet in B-flat and timpani
Meditation, for bass saxophone and live electronics
Zone 19: An Algorithmic Journey Through the 19-EDO Soundscape
Micromorphosis series, including Nos. 3 and 5
A Song Below Water, for piano, alto saxophone, bassoon, timpani and fixed media
The wind will carry us away, for strings and 8-channel fixed media (ICMC-MIT Special Call for Scores)
Research and practice
Balighi's work belongs to a long line of Iranian composers who bring the Dastgah system into contemporary writing. He approaches it through algorithms. In Dastgah, he extends traditional 12-tone serialism into a 17-tone pitch matrix derived from the Dastgah system, so that the microtonal nuances central to Persian classical music shape the serial structure.
Space is a second thread. His Electropoem series uses multichannel arrays and microtonal systems to turn spatial sound into a multi-sensory poetic experience. He calls the framework "The Breath of the Room", drawing on the phenomenology of Bachelard and Böhme. Related writing develops "resonant ecology", the idea that spatialization and site-specificity are ecological methods, not neutral tools.
Technology and notation are a third thread. His writing and music examine the following topics:
how artificial intelligence reshapes electroacoustic score generation
how composers can work as mediators between code, sound and agency
the ethics of data-embedded instruments
a shared visual vocabulary for animated notation
a five-step method that makes attentional practice, such as meditation, part of composing
He also incorporates physical computing and interactive instrument design into his performances.
Selected writings
"MAD-X: An Instrument Without a Fixed Voice", d.a.t. [divulgazioneaudiotestuale], No. 19, 2026 (October 2026)
"Fibonacci Morphologies in Microtonal Audiovisual Composition: Structure, Timbre, and Computational Form in Micromorphosis No. 3", Chroma: Journal of the Australasian Computer Music Association (November 2026)
"Composing in Stillness: A Case Study of Meditation for Bass Saxophone and Live Electronics" (July 2026)
"The Breath of the Room: Electroacoustic Poetics in Motion" (May 2026)
"Embedding Data into Instruments: An Ethical-Embodied Framework for Electroacoustic Practice", Organised Sound (February 2026)
"Dastgah: Algorithmic Explorations of Persian Microtonality and Serialism", New Sound (February 2026)
"Resonant Ecologies: Spatialization and Site-Specificity in Electroacoustic Music" (December 2025)
"Tracing Poetic Atmospheres: Multichannel Electroacoustic Soundscapes and Their Cultural Dimensions", Computer Music Journal (December 2025)
"The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Electroacoustic Score Generation: A Review", with Hideki Isoda (December 2025)
"From Programmer to Composer: A Survey of Creative Authorship in the Age of AI" (September 2025)
"Between Noise and Silence: The Mathematical Artistry of 'Meditation'" (July 2025)
"The Art and Science of Multichannel Audio in Electroacoustic Music: A Review" (January 2025)
"Toward a Common Visual Vocabulary for Animated Notation in Acoustic, Electronic, and Electroacoustic Music", Perspectives of New Music (June 2024)
Recordings
Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls (2026), compilation, Cambiataart Records.
Dastgah: Algorithmic Explorations of Persian Microtonality and Serialism, Post Orientalism Label
Zone 19: An Algorithmic Journey Through the 19-EDO Soundscape
Electropoem Series One
Radif of Iranian Music: Home Is Far Away
Hommage à R. Mutt
Phantomnesis selected work · for mixed ensemble and live electronics
"Two sealed chambers of Fiorenzanis life, communicating with each other."
Francesco Fiorenzani is one of the composers selected for Phantomnesis, an international call from Cambiata Arts for contemporary music, experimental composition and heritage-rooted works. His piece Hommage à R. Mutt is published in the compilation Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls. The call sought pieces that explore the forgotten, the near-forgotten and the reimagined. It welcomed works that bring neglected musical systems, regional practices, extinct gestures or overlooked aesthetic pathways into today's listening.
An international jury of six professional composers, performers and researchers reviewed each submission. Their own careers embody the premise of the call. Each has spent years bringing overlooked musical systems, regional practices and reimagined traditions into contemporary listening. The jurors work in Toronto, Hannover, Skopje, Bangkok and Tehran, and across Vienna, Graz and Klagenfurt in Austria. Their practices range from electroacoustic composition and open-source technology to somatic voice and live electronics, traditional Thai instruments, artistic research and jazz scholarship. They considered each work for its engagement with forgotten or near-forgotten material, its compositional richness and its artistic conviction. The five works in the compilation emerged from that process, and their composers are also invited to join the Cambiata Arts roster.
Hommage à R. Mutt was born from a desire to make two sealed chambers of Fiorenzani's artistic life communicate with each other. He calls this his "artistic bipolarity". On one side is everything he learned from improvisation, jazz and rock, which shaped the first thirty years of his life. On the other is what he has absorbed over the last five or six years about contemporary, electronic and classical music. The piece is an attempt to understand how these two parts of him can talk to each other.
At the time, Fiorenzani was composing mostly through a kind of maquette technique. He built sound agglomerates in Reaper from audio files of various kinds, then transformed them and re-orchestrated the result. He believes this method is more widespread than people realise, especially after the period that gave us a broader, spectral conception of timbre. For this piece he collected samples from jazz records, some of them very short. He used them to create a distorted audio structure that he could reuse. On top of this structure he placed very characteristic, idiomatic gestures for each instrument of the ensemble.
The guitar plays virtuosic gestures that echo the post-1980s world of the electric guitar, particularly alternative rock, with Steve Vai as a reference. The saxophone, trombone and piano draw on micro-fragments of melodic ideas from great jazz masters such as Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and J.J. Johnson. These materials form islands of sound and gesture. The islands then find their own development and formal narrative, and the result is a sort of collage piece.
The slightly provocative title refers to Marcel Duchamp, an artist Fiorenzani admires deeply. R. Mutt is the name Duchamp signed on Fountain. Fiorenzani's attempt is similar in spirit: to re-present materials that have become commonplace, and often automatic through habit, in a different light. That is also what places the piece within Phantomnesis, where overlooked and familiar material is heard anew.
Fiorenzani's ears were formed not on Beethoven or Mozart but on The Cure, Radiohead and jazz. He finds himself in a mixed, hybrid zone, certainly a highly contaminated one. He believes this hybridisation allows less academic strategies to flourish, and he is learning to recognise it as a distinctive point of his personality.
Seeing as well as hearing. This is also where his constant interest in what he can see, as well as hear, comes from. His way of experiencing music is deeply rooted in composition, and just as deeply rooted in listening and in vision. That vision branches in two directions.
Notation as a sign system. It is a way of communicating to himself, so that he can better understand his own ideas and keep control of form and of sound. In contemporary music, he believes, form and sound are aligned.
The scenic act. This comes later and concerns how a work presents itself visually, when the work is given back to an audience. It does not imply theatre, multimedia or cross-media work. It implies attention to a kind of writing that leads to an act that must be seen from an aesthetic point of view, not only heard.
Research at the Hochschule Luzern. This has become part of his research project at the Hochschule Luzern. He is finding out more about the compositional processes behind music that must be seen as well as written and heard. He thinks this opens an interesting area, one that abstracts somewhat from stylistic decisions.
A multiplicity of currents. He works in a context where there are perhaps no dominant currents today. He says it is not for him to judge whether that is good or bad. The disruptive force of past currents (structuralism, spectralism, post-serialism, minimalism) has not been exhausted. They now coexist and perhaps feed on one another.
He feels he belongs to this multiplicity, so well described by Michel Serres in Genesis. He is a child of this artistic multiplicity, which finds strength in it and also a certain unease. It is a very Pirandellian condition: being "one, no one and one hundred thousand."