Paul Hembree

Background

About Paul Hembree

Paul Hembree is a composer, creative technologist, and educator, working in music artificial intelligence, new music, and interactive media. He is a versatile composer and collaborator, with projects ranging from procedurally generated production music for film and media, to experimental concert works performed throughout the U.S. and Europe. In 2018, seeking to responsibly shape the future of music creation in an age of automation, Hembree joined Amper Music, where he was lead asset developer, a role that combined composition with software development. Amper designed a human-in-the-loop artificial intelligence: a process that allowed the creative decision making of small teams of composer-developers and sampling engineers to generate production-quality audio at scale. In late 2020, Amper was acquired by Shutterstock, where Hembree worked as a software engineer, focusing on music genre detection machine learning models. In mid-2022, Hembree began working as the lead software engineer for procedurally generated music at BandLab Technologies, returning to a creative focus. His recent projects include the score and sound design for Rite of Tephra (2020), by Platypus Games, and the score and sound design Goodnight Traffic City (2017), a game by developer Loren Schmidt and artist Kia Labeija. Concert works include Ikarus-Azur (2015), commissioned by the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, as well as his audiovisual improvisation environment, Apocryphal Chrysopoeia (2016), which was featured at National Sawdust on the 2016 New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. As a computer musician, he has collaborated with many prominent performers of new music, including the JACK Quartet, Irvine Arditti, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Signal, and the Callithumpian Consort, on compositions by Pauline Oliveros, Brian Ferneyhough, and Kaija Saariaho, and Roger Reynolds, among others. As a computer musician, Hembree has collaborated with Reynolds on several major projects since 2011, including FLiGHT (2016) at the Park Avenue Armory, and Shifting/Drifting (2016), at the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music. In 2015 he received his PhD in music, specializing in composition and computer music, from the University of California, San Diego, where he taught music theory, history, composition, and game audio courses as an instructor. During 2017 and 2018 he was a visiting assistant professor at Bard College and a lecturer at Skidmore College, where he taught courses on interactive media with MAX/MSP, game design and games studies courses.