Event details

The Composition Colloquium presents a talk by Will Thompson.

About

William A. Thompson IV (WATIV) is a composer, pianist, electronic musician, and educator whose work explores the intersection of technology, human expression, and memory through sound. His compositions often merge acoustic performance, digital systems, and speech-derived musical materials, resulting in works that are at once conceptual and deeply emotive. Thompson’s creative practice has been featured by NPR’s All Things Considered, the BBC, and Leonardo Music Journal, among others.

A formative experience in his life and art was his 2004 deployment to Baghdad, Iraq, where he served as a Counterintelligence Agent during the Iraq War. That experience has continued to shape his creative inquiry, leading to projects that investigate listening, conflict, and the role of technology in mediating human experience. His early work Baghdad Music Journal documented that period and became the foundation for later electroacoustic projects, including WATIV XX: Twenty Years of Silence, which revisits those materials two decades later through the lens of speech transcription, machine learning, and live piano performance.

Thompson studied jazz piano at the University of New Orleans, where he earned both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Jazz Studies. He later completed a PhD in Experimental Music and Digital Media at Louisiana State University, focusing on model-based cross-synthesis between music and human speech. His research bridges artistic creation and technological experimentation, exploring how computational processes can extend compositional thinking.

He is currently Assistant Professor of Sound and Recording Arts at The University of Southern Mississippi, where he teaches courses in audio technology, electronic music, and digital composition. His recent projects include the design of the Infastain Piano, an augmented acoustic instrument that integrates tactile and electromagnetic sustain systems for networked performance, and the EARS (Established Artists Recorded by Students) initiative, which connects professional artists with student engineers in the recording studio. As an improvising pianist and computer musician, Thompson continues to perform throughout the Gulf South and abroad, presenting work that fuses jazz improvisation, experimental electronics, and interactive media.

Ticketing

Free, Unticketed