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Intro

I’m Nathan Ho, an SF Bay Area-based musician, software engineer, and educator specializing in digital signal processing. My debut album, Haywire Frontier, was released on tokinogake in September 2023.

I’m a former dev for the open source audio platform SuperCollider. Since 2021, I have run the YouTube channel SynthDef, where I upload full SuperCollider coding sessions and show off some patches I’ve been working on.

If you have questions or comments, you can email me at nathan.waikin.ho with the domain gmail.com. If you are on the scsynth.org forums, I’m also reachable by private message there as simply “nathan.”

About this site

I started this as an outlet to write about music technology, where my main interests concern tools for creating experimental and left-field electronic music (particularly electronic art music, glitch, noise, and the “IDM” family). With my writing, I’m interested in bridging the worlds of music tech journalism with in-depth academic papers to create resources for technically proficient musicians.

Topics of interest include: vocal synthesis, granular synthesis, physical modeling, virtual analog, effect design, algorithmic composition, circuit bending/bit bending, microtonal/xenharmonic music, music cognition and perception, machine listening, sonification of mathematics, and music tech history. I’m an open source fanatic, and more broadly I advocate for music tech that is transparent, cost-efficient, and built for portability and long-term preservation. Some of my posts are dedicated to explaining established concepts, and others serve as lab notebook entries for projects I’ve undertaken.

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Artist bio

Nathan Ho (何衛健, b. 1997) is an SF Bay Area native, electronic musician, educator, and specialist in digital signal processing. His debut album “Haywire Frontier” was released on the Japanese label tokinogake in September 2023. His work combines his background in mathematics, science, and modern classical composition with aggressive, hypermodern sound design. A lifelong open source advocate, he is a former developer of SuperCollider and maintains an extensive collection of free online resources on music technology.