Andrew Grathwohl

Andrew Grathwohl is a composer, audio engineer, and software architect, and the creator of Sonic Multiplicities. He describes his practice as "shamanism via DSP" and works from a single founding insight: that audio engineering is a software engineering problem: signals are data, studios are systems, and mixes are algorithms. Sonic Multiplicities is where that idea becomes music: a real-time machine listening and response system that acts as an AI free-improvisation partner to a live soloist, generating accompaniment from context-aware digital signal processing and neural networks rather than from backing tracks, patterns, or prompts.

He has been building the project since roughly 2010, when an early version was runner-up at the SEAMUS summer festival. On the releases he does not play an instrument; his credit is composer, programmer, engineer, and producer, while performers such as Garrett Semmelink and Tyler Dinner improvise live. Sessions are captured as performed, with no overdubbing, filtering, or post-processing, a stance he labels "Honest Electroacoustic Music." The catalog is free to download and share, and the homepage's "uninstall your DAW" is only half a joke: the work is a sustained argument that computers should be used to challenge musicians rather than simplify their workflows away.

Grathwohl studied at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music. His engineering is industrial-grade as well as artistic: at Audible he built automated audio quality-control systems and is named inventor on US Patent 9,412,395 for narrator selection by spectral comparison, and he presented at AES New York in 2017. He records separately under other names, among them the solo compositional alias BROKEN HEARTS ON ICE and the early Brooklyn bass project CPU/GOD. He now lives in Tennessee.

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