Hey, what's up?

I'm Ariel.

Third-culture-individual.

I'm interested in music, and video games, and philosophy, and teaching.

I received my undergraduate degree in Media Studies at Wheaton College, which is a small liberal arts college just outside Chicago, IL; and then I did my MFA and PhD right here at SCM.

I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the idea of ludomusicality and how considering music-making in terms of "play" could help address the growing disconnect between emerging musical practices and certain—perhaps anachronistic—musical institutions.  If we consider Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète from back in the day, or today's prompt-based AI generation, and everything in between, it is undeniable that many of our musical landscapes are increasingly shaped by inscription INSTEAD OF bio-mechanical activities. Yet, since a lot of our intuitions about music are often still informed by musical experiences centered on our somatic capabilities, we tend to have a recurring pattern of clumsily forcing new musicking into the mold of old musicking. One specific example I discuss in my dissertation is the absurd gesturing of EDM DJs in concert situations when in fact their acousmatic music-making actually precludes the type of live performance associated with traditional embodied instrument playing. So anyways, long story short, I enjoy turning to phenomenology, existentialism, and play studies, to help me understand any musical situations that seem contrived or unusual.

I currently lecture on topics such as Philosophy of Technology and Popular Music Studies at City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Baptist University.

Oh, and I did a TEDx talk fairly recently. It's about how the countercultural caricature of "The Man" is no longer as helpful as it once was for making sense of all the ills in the world, and how the angsty teenagers of today can perhaps look towards Martin Heidegger's idea of Enframing instead. (https://youtu.be/LnO3CnVPqog?si=If7Rj5UlMklNB5Xb)

I also dabbled a bit in projection mapping, kinetic sculpture-making, and other new media projects back in my MFA days. I have some video documentation of this stuff @ https://arielmusics.com/