Who We Are

Wavefield Ensemble is a collectively organized group of musicians dedicated to performing music and creating new artistic work at the highest level, and to actively engaging in educational activities geared toward inspiring the next generation of artists and performers. We aim to collaborate in an inclusive fashion and amplify the voices of a diverse spectrum of composers, artists, performers, and thinkers in an anti-racist environment. Our goal is to share this work as broadly as possible and in so doing to inspire those we contact to a more deeply creative engagement with the world.

We are musicians and artists, we are people working together to make our world better by sharing our work: from creating and performing all sorts of music in all sorts of venues around the world, to running other artistic organizations, to sharing our craft with those who aspire to make their own work, to commissioning and developing new work.

Learn more about the individual musicians of Wavefield here.

We have participated in residencies at MANA Contemporary in Jersey City, and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and performed concerts at Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust, EMPAC, The Park Avenue Armory, MANA, Areté Gallery and other spaces.

Want to know more? Interested in collaborating? Just want to say hi?

Contact us.

In the mean time, we hope to see you at a performance.

About Our Name

Wave field synthesis is a technique for spatializing electronic sound that has been in development since the late 1980s. Most recently, the Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (where we had our inaugural concert in 2016) has built a system that dramatically forwards the state of this art.

Using a large number of speakers situated extremely close together (558 in the case of EMPAC), the system creates the perception of larger sound waves out of many small, highly coordinated waves. Or rather, it creates the perception of a sound originating not from the speakers themselves, but from anywhere else in the room. Virtual sound sources. Sonic holographs.

This concept has been a dream of composers at least since Edgard Varèse wrote of the "movement of sound-masses" and of "shifting planes" of sound. Varèse was right: it is an unbelievable thing to experience.

We see poetic parallels in the creation of our ensemble in the realization of this dream.