Michael Frengel

Michael Frengel is Associate Teaching Professor and Director of the Sonification Lab in the Department of Music at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design, where he has been a core faculty member since 2005. He also holds an affiliate appointment in Northeastern’s Center for Design.

Frengel’s creative and research practice sits at the intersection of electroacoustic composition, audio software development, spatial audio, and data sonification. His compositions have been performed at major international venues including the ISCM World Music Days (Wrocław), the International Computer Music Conference (Daegu; Boston), the Venice New Music Festival, Crisalide Festival (Italy), and Sonic Crossings (Cyprus), and he has held invited residencies at the Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing), Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität (Linz), Hochschule für Musik und Theater (Hamburg), and the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras (Morelia), among others. He is the author of The Unorthodox Guitar: A Guide to Alternative Performance Practice (Oxford University Press, 2017). His album Music for Guitar and Electronics was released on Ravello Records in 2020.

As a software developer, Frengel has built tools at the boundary of music and technology throughout his career. His current projects include Soundbug, a commercial macOS audio editor for visualization, analysis, and signal processing; Mobi-lyze, a data sonification system for Type-1 diabetes management; and GuitarPose, a computer-vision machine learning system for quantifying classical guitar technique.

He holds a Ph.D. in electroacoustic music composition from City University London, an M.A. from Dartmouth College, and a B.A. from San Jose State University.