Patrick Chin Ting CHAN
Composer · Performer · Improviser
"Music for the free mind: what cannot be described, only imagined."
The music of composer Patrick Chin Ting CHAN (b. 1986) is motivated by a search for an expression of the free minds that cannot be described, but imagined. It stems from a distrust of the human senses. It is often inspired by abstract patterns he discovers in daily objects, as well as imaginary landscapes and human interactions, but it depicts the subjects from unexpected perspectives, allowing listeners to reimagine their surroundings.
He is a selected artist of Phantomnesis, the international call from Cambiata Arts, and his work Refractions appears in the compilation Phantomnesis: Sites, Streets & Sacred Spaces.
Chan grew up in Hong Kong and came to the United States in 2003. He has been featured in events including Ars Electronica, IRCAM's ManiFeste, ISCM World Music Days, UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers and Venice Art Biennale, among others. He has held residencies and commissions from organizations such as Charlotte Street Foundation, Hong Kong Composers' Guild, Music Teachers National Association and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has worked with ensembles such as City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong, Ensemble intercontemporain (France), Ensemble Metamorphosis (Serbia), eighth blackbird (U.S.), Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Mivos Quartet (U.S.) and New York New Music Ensemble. His music has been performed in venues such as Staatstheater Darmstadt, Seoul Arts Center, DiMenna Center for Classical Music and National Sawdust, and in more than thirty countries.
Awards and other recognition include those from the American Prize, ASCAP, Association for the Promotion of New Music, Foundation Destellos, The EAR Classical, Foundation for Modern Music, Interdisciplinary Festival for Music and Sound Art – Shut Up and Listen!, Lin Yao Ji Music Foundation of China, loadbang, MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music, newEar, New-Music Consortium, Semaine internationale de la musique électroacoustique, Soli fan tutti Composition Prize, Utah Arts Festival and WOCMAT International Phil Winsor Computer Music Competition, among others. His recordings appear on albums with ABLAZE, Darling, Empirica, Navona, New Focus, Phasma-Music, Ravello and RMN Classical labels. His scores are published through BabelScores.
Chan is also an active performer and improviser of accordion, guqin, and live electronics, using a Eurorack modular system and other custom interfaces on the computer. He is currently an Associate Professor of Music Composition at Ball State University. He holds degrees from the University of Missouri–Kansas City (D.M.A.), Bowling Green State University (M.M.) and San José State University (B.M.). His primary teachers include Chen Yi, Zhou Long, James Mobberley, Paul Rudy, Marilyn Shrude and Brian Belet.
Highlights
Phantomnesis selected artist, Cambiata Arts; Featured in the compilation Phantomnesis: Sites, Streets & Sacred Spaces
Featured at Ars Electronica, IRCAM's ManiFeste, ISCM World Music Days, UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers and Venice Art Biennale
Works with Ensemble intercontemporain, eighth blackbird, Mivos Quartet, City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong and New York New Music Ensemble
Performances in more than thirty countries
Recordings on ABLAZE, Navona, New Focus, Ravello, RMN Classical and other labels
Awards from the American Prize, ASCAP, WOCMAT International Phil Winsor Computer Music Competition and others
Scores published through BabelScores
Associate Professor of Music Composition, Ball State University
Selected works
Pulse (2025), for fixed media
Refractions (2025), for fixed media
Water Dust (2024), for indeterminate performers and video
Mirror Sculpture (2023), for fixed media
Resonant Collision III (2023), for two instruments and electronics
Shadow Objects (2022), for fixed media
Stutter (2021), for fixed media
fuse IV (2020), for five performers
In-pulse (2018), for violin and piano
Insight I (2018), for solo oboe
Flare (2017), for solo violin
Flying Ink (2017), for flute, clarinet in B-flat, bassoon, trombone, viola and harp
Falling Stars (2016–17), for wind ensemble
Refractions
Phantomnesis selected work
"Decade-old field recordings from Kansas City parks, bent between memory and dissolution.."
Patrick Chin Ting CHAN 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 Refractions is included in the compilation Phantomnesis: Sites, Streets & Sacred Spaces. 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 works in the compilation emerged from that process, and their composers are also invited to join the Cambiata Arts roster.
Chan placed Refractions in the category of memory, trace and the persistence of place. It is built from decade-old field recordings, personal archival materials captured in Kansas City parks during 2013–14. They serve as fragile, near-forgotten sonic documents. The unremarkable ambient layers (birdsong, wind, distant traffic, playground echoes, footsteps) were once everyday presences at the edge of perception. They lay dormant in his personal archive until he revived them for this work.
The piece engages the "near-forgotten" by treating these recordings as oral histories of overlooked urban-nature intersections. They are partial traces of lived experience, distorted through time and processing: filtering, spectral transformation, piano resonances, and metal, glass and water timbres. Like memory itself, they shift between clarity and dissolution, bending the familiar into unstable recombinations. By reframing these peripheral sounds, which are historical materials from his own compositional archive, Refractions explores how ordinary pasts persist and are reassembled through present listening. It blurs the boundaries between documentary fidelity and imaginative reconstruction.
Chan is a composer crafting emergent, non-linear music of shifting timbres and gestures inspired by abstract visual patterns found in daily life.
Emergent non-linear composition. His music grows from patterns that interact and change rather than following a straight line. His fuse series, written for ensembles including the Ball State University Electroacoustic Ensemble, is a set of controlled aleatory compositions that explore the idea of fusing different timbral materials into one entity.
Timbral and gestural sound design. Timbre and gesture are the main materials of his writing, in both fixed media and live works. The material of Mirror Sculpture comes from recordings of analog camera clicks, a printer at work, glass shattering and piano strings, as well as different synthesis models. He also performs as an improviser on accordion and guqin, and on live electronics with a Eurorack modular system and custom computer interfaces.
Sonic abstraction of everyday objects. He finds abstract patterns in daily objects, imaginary landscapes and human interactions, and he depicts them from unexpected perspectives. Water Dust is made of 17 short videos whose graphics and sounds conjure water droplets, dust particles and other microscopic phenomena, as abstract and distorted geometric patterns or waves in motion. Performers improvise during or between the segments, responding to the audiovisuals.