John Pax Mulligan is a musician: composer, sound artist, audio engineer, field recorder, keyboardist, and educator who grew up on Whadjuk Noongar Country in Kalamunda, Western Australia, and currently works on the traditional land of the Massachusett people in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

composer

I have written music for a wide range of forces with and without electronics, from instrumental solos and chamber music to large-ensemble and orchestral works, as well as site-specific sound installations and acousmatic works performed on concert loudspeaker systems.

My music is currently concerned with the expression of self and place through a musical world; the relationship between a compositional structure and a physical performance space; the ways landscapes accumulate and hold personal and collective histories.

My music draws heavily on my expertise as an audio engineer specializing in spatial audio for studio production and concert performance; more than a decade of experience organizing and producing concerts of new music with friends and fellow composers; and an expansive field-recording practice which begins with the hope of sharing my experience of certain ecological polyphonies.

technology and research

Some of my earliest musical experiences involved music technology, although I spent the first decade of my musical life engaged with instrumental performance and composition. When I began studying electronic music in 2014, my compositional and technological research interests entered into conversation.

My wide-ranging experiences across composition, electronic performance, chamber-music performance, and technical research have contributed to the development of numerous approaches, tools, methods, and electroacoustic workflows that continue to grow in support of my expressive goals. This circular relationship allows the poetics of my compositional project to expand and mutate while giving my technical research its distinctive lens.

My technical research in recent years has focused on spatial composition, sound projection, and diffusion; live electronics and electronic performance practices; higher-order ambisonic (HOA) and various beamforming processes; as well as edge-case field-recording techniques, high-fidelity sound reproduction, modular sound synthesis, and the use of legacy audio test equipment.

Recent compositional projects have drawn these interests together, allowing me to move freely through actual spaces and imagined illustrations. Alongside my compositional work, other recent technical research projects of note have included the reconstruction and performance of several electroacoustic works by Luigi Nono, as well as the development of a touring three-dimensional loudspeaker orchestra and spatial-audio performance system for a forthcoming production of Strauss’s Salome.

institution and community building

I am the founding Managing Director of the Shelemay Sound Lab in Harvard University’s Department of Music. Beginning with a small collection of field-recording equipment and some iMacs, over four years I developed the Lab into a department-wide resource working closely with graduate students and faculty across the Department’s five subdisciplines.

During this time, the Lab was reestablished in a larger space and expanded into a university-wide hub for sound-based research and practice, teaching, artistic production, performance, and critical listening. Each year, the Lab serves hundreds of students, faculty members, artists, and researchers across twelve Harvard schools and institutes, as well as more than twenty academic and cultural units. Between 2022 and 2026, through the Lab, I variously curated, produced, engineered, and taught across a program of more than seventy workshops, performances, residencies, research projects, listening events, and guest lectures.

The Lab’s work across Harvard has connected sound studies and practice-based artistic research with fields including architecture, landscape architecture, physics, engineering, theater, visual art, ornithology, neuroscience, anthropology, literature, and medicine, while sustaining its core mission of supporting edge-case research in ethnomusicology and electroacoustic music.

In my wider responsibilities to the Music Department, I oversaw the development of its spatial-audio, studio-recording, field-recording, and critical-listening facilities; managed major equipment and infrastructure projects; secured numerous donations of high-end audio equipment and recording technologies; and, most recently, helped develop an interdepartmental spatial-audio collaboration supported by an award from Harvard’s Frontiers of Innovation for Societal Impact Fund, administered by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research.

teaching

I want my students to approach technology not as a collection of neutral tools, but as artistic material itself: as something that should be questioned, misused, redesigned, and made expressively resonant, if they wish. I believe that, as an educator, it is important to balance clear instruction with an ethical responsibility towards each student, meeting them as they are and where they are in their individual creative and personal journeys.

I have lectured and led workshops on composition, electroacoustic music, spatial audio, critical listening, sound production, music theory, and field recording at the university level. Through the Shelemay Sound Lab, I have had the privilege of mentoring dozens of students each year on their creative projects and technological interests. In spring 2027, I will teach my course Spatialising Sound at Harvard.

I have also lectured at the University of Western Australia, tutored in composition at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and privately tutored in Renaissance counterpoint. My teaching at Harvard has been recognized with the Stephen and Sandra Schafer Award for Teaching Excellence and four Harvard Distinction in Teaching awards from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.

education

I hold a PhD and MA in Music Composition from Harvard University; a Bachelor of Music with first-class honours from the University of Melbourne; and a Bachelor of Arts in History and Music from the University of Western Australia.

keyboard

I am an avid keyboard player and active continuo player, currently performing with the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra.

contact

johnpax73[at]gmail.com