Austin Oting Har

Austin Oting Har is a US-based composer, writer, and performer with a background in music technology and ancient philosophy. His debut opera "The Ghost" received the Create NSW Arts and Cultural Fund (2020) via the NSW Government and has been broadcast on modern classical and experimental electronic music programs in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. His work utilizes ancient concepts, languages, and instruments, digital sound design and creative coding, bridging traditional Western and Eastern, experimental electronic, and contemporary classical music worlds. His technology-mediated composition and performance practice explores timbral and microtonal materials, focusing on the interplay between semantic, organic, and algorithmic processes. Phonaesthetics informs his creative writing and translation, where the sound of words is as important as their meaning.

Austin is an Associate Artist of the Australian Music Centre, the national organization representing Australian art music. His music has been released internationally on Neuma Records (US) and Possible Futures (Germany), commissioned by Dark Mofo (Australia), Berlin Atonal and MaerzMusik (Germany), and awarded in the Carillon Society of Australia Composition Competition (Australia) and a Special Prize in the Ise-Shima International Composition Competition (Japan). His poetry is published in the Modern Haiku (US), Acorn (US), Presence (UK), and seashores (Ireland) journals. Artistic discovery and academic research walk hand-in-hand in Austin’s work, the latter focusing on the integration of live computer tools into traditional interdisciplinary performing art forms, specifically Greek tragedy and Japanese Noh theatre. He also developed new composition and performance techniques for the ancient Greek aulos in collaboration with Barnaby Brown. He has been invited to present his research at the Audio Engineering Society Convention (NYC), Classics and Ancient History Research Seminar Series (Sydney), Creative Leadership for Innovation and Change Seminar Series (Virgin Islands), and Composer's Colloquium (Berkeley). His articles have been published in Context: Journal of Music Research (University of Melbourne), the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, and is forthcoming in Leonardo (MIT Press). His collaborations extend globally, engaging with interaction designers, linguists, and cultural bearers across Australia, Europe, and Japan. Additionally, Austin was an editor for the Sydney Undergraduate Journal of Musicology (University of Sydney) which publishes research by Sydney’s top honors students.

Born in Australia, Austin first played violin in orchestras then studied composition, music technology, and philosophy, creating a variety of music before moving to Hollywood to work as a project coordinator and audio engineer. He has also worked in other varied music technology-focused roles including as an audio-visual technician in San Francisco, a custom symbol designer and music transcriber for traditional Chinese numerical notation to Western notation, and a music producer for commercials in Australia and New Zealand. He holds a DMA in Composition and Music Technology from Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, an MMus in Music Technology Innovation (Summa Cum Laude) from Berklee College of Music, and an MSc in Ancient Philosophy (with Merit) on Plato’s ontology of perception from the University of Edinburgh. He received the Research Training Program (RTP) stipend via the Australian Government and the Sydney Moss Scholarship via the University of Sydney. After two years of Covid-cancelled premieres of his debut opera, he undertook an alternate presentation that was supported by funded residencies at Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida) and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska).

Since 2023, Austin has been the Assistant Professor of Music at the University of the Virgin Islands, and in Fall 2024, he will be a Visiting Scholar-Composer at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California, Berkeley. He established UVI's electronic music studio and has additionally taught at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and Berklee College of Music. He supports and develops underserved youth initiatives in the Virgin Islands and California.