Jody Elff (born February 18, 1970, in America) is a Grammy Awards-winning audio engineer, sound artist and designer. [1] [2]
Jody Elff (born February 18, 1970, in America) is a Grammy Awards-winning audio engineer, sound artist and designer. [1] [2]
Elff grew up in Freehold, New Jersey, with parents George and Vera Elff. George was an electrician, and Vera was a former hairdresser and full-time mother.
Elff displayed an interest in music from a very early age, and throughout his education studied instruments including the guitar, saxophone, piano and voice. During High School, Elff became interested in the intersection of music making and technology, experimenting with synthesizers of the era and multi-track recordings.
Elff studied music at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, graduating in 1991 with a Bachelor of Music degree specializing in Music Synthesis, focusing on sound design, MIDI systems and early computer audio editing software. [3]
While at the Berklee College of Music, Elff became affiliated with several regional sound system vendors; he worked after class, and on weekends, providing tech support for shows around the Boston area, which led to his first international touring opportunity immediately after graduating in 1991.
After graduating, Elff worked with several New York based productions companies and has provided sound support for events at Radio City Music Hall, Madison Square Garden, and many other venues. [4] [5] [6] Elff also provided mixing and technical support for several early MTV productions. [7]
Throughout the 1990s Jody continued to tour in the US and internationally with various artists including New York Voices, Diana Krall, Hothouse Flowers, and others. [8] In 1999 Jody began a decade-long association with Laurie Anderson, starting with her "Songs and Stories from Moby Dick" project, and over the next 10 years included numerous tours, installation and recording projects. [9] [10]
Elff's work has expanded to include a diverse range of projects, from live concert audio to film composition, opera and theatrical sound design, field recordings, studio recording projects, fine-art installations and technical innovation. [4] [7] [2] [11] [12] Primarily music-driven, his work spans all genres. [4]
Jody has recorded and mixed dozens of albums, including the 2017 GRAMMY award-winning "Sing Me Home" by Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. [1] [13] [14] His fine art sound installations have been presented internationally, including the permanent installation "STRATA" in Lyon, France. [14]
In collaboration with the composer Anna Clyne, Elff has developed the Augmented Orchestra (AO); which involves audio processing integrated with the composition applied to a live orchestral performance, thereby expanding the sonic potential of the acoustic orchestra in real time. [15] [16] [17]
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Jody began exploring a long-simmering idea about how to mix high channel-count audio in real time over distance, resulting in a patented methodology to do so. [2] This inspired the formation of a new company, Harris Elff Audio Resources (HEAR) with long-time friends and colleagues John Harris and Robert Macomber. [18] HEAR now stands as an industry leader for live audio recording and broadcast in North America. [18] [19] [11]
Professional Affiliations include
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York City during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981.
Heiner Goebbels is a German composer, conductor and professor at Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen and artistic director of the International Festival of the Arts Ruhrtriennale 2012–14. His composition Stifters Dinge (2007) received five votes in a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000, and writers for The Guardian ranked his composition Hashirigaki (2000) the ninth greatest classical composition of the same period.
Osvaldo Noé Golijov is an Argentine composer of classical music and music professor, known for his vocal and orchestral work.
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David Krakauer is an American clarinetist who performs klezmer, jazz, classical music, and avant-garde improvisation.
Octavio Brunetti was a pianist, arranger and composer from Argentina. He was best known for his participation in the album Te amo tango by Raul Jaurena, which won the Latin Grammy Award for Best Tango Album in 2007, and was one of the most sought after tango pianists.
Alisa Weilerstein is an American classical cellist. She was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.
Kelley O'Connor is an American singer. She earned her Bachelor of Music degree from Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California and her master's degree in Music from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Anna Clyne is an English composer resident in the USA. She has worked in both acoustic music and electroacoustic music.
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Nuevo is a 2002 album by the Kronos Quartet composed entirely of music of Mexican origin.
Ayre is the twelfth album by composer Osvaldo Golijov, it is a cycle of songs commissioned by Carnegie Hall for soprano Dawn Upshaw, which offers a tour of the Mediterranean, particularly in that mixture of Spanish, Jewish and Arabic influences that once coexisted quietly in Spain before the Reconquista.
Megalopolis (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the soundtrack album to the 2024 epic science fiction drama film Megalopolis, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The album consisted of 32 tracks, predominantly featuring the musical score composed by Osvaldo Golijov and classical music heard in the film. The soundtrack was released under the Milan Records label on September 27, 2024.
The Augmented Orchestra (AO) is a technology created, developed and implemented by the composer Anna Clyne and sound designer Jody Elff.
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