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Ryan Maguire (born 1984; San Diego, California) is an experimental musician completing a PhD in Composition and Computer Technologies from the University of Virginia. Credited with creating “a great new genre of ambient ghost music” by SPIN’s Death and Taxes, his work traces the boundaries of auditory perception and aesthetic memory. His materials—hums and hisses, plosives and fricatives, exhalations and reverberations—are second generation digital artifacts. Once discarded as noise by perceptual coding algorithms, his compositions feature “throwaways that have become testimonies” to the forgotten and disrespected elements of our own moment.
Maguire’s music has received millions of digital plays in over 200 countries and territories. Ghost in the MP3 has been covered by the BBC, Deutschlandradio, CBC, NPR, Vice, and WIRED, with related awards from the International Computer Music Association, Public Radio Exchange, and the Raven Society. He has presented in Los Angeles, Berlin, London, New York, Toronto, Copenhagen, and elsewhere. His writing is published in the SEAMUS Journal and by ISSPA, SMC, and ICMC. His compositions have been performed by ensembles such as JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire, and Callithumpian Consort, and his recorded music is available on Ravello Records and Bandcamp. He is a 2018/19 Dean’s Dissertation Fellow at the University of Virginia.
contact: ryan (at) virginia (dot) edu
