Fred Szymanski is a New York-based electroacoustic composer and sound-and-image artist whose work explores non-linear processes linked to generative systems.

Szymanski’s works have been performed at international festivals including, most recently, the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival (2024), Matera Intermedia Festival (MA/IN) (2023), the ArteScienza Festival inRome (2023), and the NYU IRCAM Forum Concert (2022), as well as performing live-diffusion as part of the Convergence Festival (England, 2019), SEAMUS Festival (Boston, 2019), Città di Udine (Italy, 2018), International Festival of Experimental Music as part of Musica Nova (Bratislava, 2018), New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (2019), and Musica Nova (Prague, 2017).

His image-sound works have been featured at the Recombinant Media Labs’ CineChamber (Artistic Director, Naut Humon), at Mutek (Montreal), the CTM.11 Festival (Berlin), SonicLIGHT (Amsterdam), the 9th Biennial of the Moving Image (Geneva), and the European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück).

Szymanski has been the recipient of several awards, including Premier Prix, Electroacoustique, Concours International de Composition Electroacoustique de Monaco (2015), First Prize, Musica Nova ((2017), and Special Mention, Città di Udine (2018). He received Honorary Mentions at Matera Intermedia Festival (MA/IN) (2016) and at the International Destellos Competition on Electroacoustic Music (Argentina, 2017).

Under the moniker, A LAMINAR PROJECT, he has released recordings with the labels Sub Rosa (Belgium), Asphodel Ltd. (San Francisco), JDK Productions (Amsterdam), Soleilmoon (Portland), and Staalplaat (Amsterdam).

His work has been exhibited at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology as part of the group show, What Sound Does a Color Make? (2005), at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the BitStreams show (2001), and at such venues as the Diapason Gallery for Sound (New York), Artists Space (New York), and the Valencia Biennial’s VideoRom. An early work was part of the Sonorità Prospettiche (Prospective Sonorities) program at Suono Ambiente (Rimini, Italy), and travelled to the Venice Biennale, Kulturforum (Bonn), Kulturreferat (Munich), Lugano, Switzerland, and the City of Turin.

Szymanski studied film and video production while pursuing a BFA at Rhode Island School of Design and participated in electronic music classes at MacColl Studios (Providence, RI) with Professor Gerald (Schep) Shapiro and Thomas DeLio. During that time, he performed multichannel live electronic music in Boston and Providence and other cities in New England.

After relocating to New York, he continued to perform live electronic music as a member of the electronic/industrial band IKE YARD. The band released albums with Factory America (U.S. offshoot of Factory Records) and Les Disques du Crepuscule (Belgium).

In subsequent years, he studied algorithmic composition and sound synthesis using Common Lisp Music with Dr. Heinrich Taube at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research and Acoustics (CCRMA). He has attended workshops in Csound programming with Professor Jon Christopher Nelson at the UNT College of Music (CEMI) and participated in the intensive Max/Jitter Programming Workshop for Real-time 3D, given by Jasch, at iMAL (Brussels). Most recently, he attended the Ircam Spatial Audio Workshop using Wave Field Synthesis and High-Order Ambisonics (HOA) conducted by Markus Noisternig and Hans Tutschku at EMPAC in Rensselaer, New York.