I am a South-Argentinian academic researcher, composer, saxophonist, and sound artist based in Copenhagen.
me. I found through sound a way of knowing and an access to a world of data of many types. Throughout the years I developed as a musician and later as a researcher in connection to data and HCI, exploring the affective and entangled dimensions of human experiencing. I research how data can be felt rather than just read, turning perception itself into a research instrument. I further compose for ensembles, build interactive systems, and improvise on the saxophone. As a composer I created 10 records of long compositions navigating between contemporary music and jazz in my earlier career. My work received the Best Use of Sound Academic Award at ICAD 2024, among other recognitions.
‘Inspired by such people as Anthony Braxton, Miguel Crozzoli makes music that is both highly intellectual and emotional.’ — Jakob Baekgaard, allaboutjazz.com >more
research. I am a PhD fellow at the Intelligent Instruments Lab, University of Iceland, where I investigate how interactive multimodal systems can turn data exploration into an affective, embodied practice. I collaborate with people ranging from researchers to artists — including oceanographers, ecoacoustic experts, musicologists, and literary scholars studying emotions in the Icelandic sagas — developing meaningful data experiences for scientific dissemination and artistic contexts, treating data not as passive information but as an agent for meaning-making.
degrees. PhD in Cultural Studies, ongoing (University of Iceland) · Advanced Postgraduate Diploma (2022, RMC) · Master in Music Creation (2020, RMC) · Cultural Management (2015, UNC) · Jazz Specialization (2019, Manuel de Falla) · Bachelor in Music (2008, EMBA)
‘Miguel Crozzoli, saxophoniste ténor, nous rappelle au bon souvenir des saxophonistes ardents de la free music…’ — Le Son Du Grisli >more
photo: Luise Volkman
The music I composed for this group is inspired by climate emergencies and sounds like the spirits of nature rising in communion — like the sound of the ocean and the forest, weaving textural nets and spiking chants. The audience enters a space of reflection, where wild emotions emerge in a soulful journey.
After my big orchestral project The Strangement Society, I got curious about the creation of scientific sonifications — could I use my own aesthetic universe to design how sonifications should sound, and how different data mappings interact with sound parameters such as frequency modulation and panning?
During 2020–2022 I conducted Sounding Numbers, a practice-based art research project at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, part of my Advanced Postgraduate Degree. The data came from deforestation and ocean contamination — because I believe we should talk more about, and find new ways to communicate, climate change.
With my last piece, I Am The Ocean, came a plot twist: instead of scientific theories I worked from philosopher Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects — philosophy ecologies connecting to a more abstract layer of imagination.
The project had two artistic outcomes: my electronic-acoustic compositions and participatory sound installations — the sweet and harsh results of my perception of our dystopian present. A perception that shows the dark beauty of the end of the world, while offering awareness and hope for community action!
My wild and beautiful SCI-Music Electronic-Acoustic Orchestra — a 13-piece ensemble with voice and electronics.
From 2018 until 2020 I composed music for this small orchestra, inspired by cosmology and in conversation with scientists conducting fascinating outer-space research. The musical outcome came as a journey into an immersive sci-fi experience: layers of textures driving hypnotic melodic passages that develop into beautiful choral layerings.
Three orchestral pieces, each grown from space science: neutron stars, colliding black holes, and the cosmic microwave background.
For Cosmic Transients I worked with Dr. Radoslaw Jan Wojtak of the DARK Cosmology Centre (Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen) — grounding the compositional process in the science, and the science in emotion.
In my Participatory Sound Installations, I seek to create an aesthetic perception of scientific knowledge. The sounds, the lights, the environment, and the participants' actions come together in these artworks to foster curiosity and a pallet of emotions, helping to rediscover a world that is always radically changing.
In these pieces, I worked with topics such as climate emergencies and cosmology, among others, to build a bridge between scientific novelties and our perceptions in a playful relation between science, art, and technology.
While working on my research project on data sonification, Sounding Numbers (2020–2022), I decided to explore a participatory use for the sonifications I was creating — an immersive, welcoming, and open space for the participants' perception, allowing them to imagine realities and experience emotionally the scientific theories I worked with.
I addressed ocean contamination, deforestation, neutron stars, and spaciality for a critical perspective on LOVE — using technology to extend our sensorial world: motion and heartbeat sensors, MIDI controllers, CO₂ sensors, and transducers. The physical action of participation is a very strong action — an artivist action that brings a sense of community.
An installation on climate emergencies inviting the audience to listen to the health of our world's forests while engaging in a deforestation micro-activism practice. The sonifications use 20 years of data from Global Forest Watch. Resilient by design: it works in gardens, forests, greenhouses — or a lonely tree in a shopping center.
Walk around and listen, this is your environment. See the colors and feel the textures surrounding you. .breathe. Put your ear against the trunk of the tree. hear. .breathe again. Plant some seeds with your bare hands.
An installation on the perception of our body and the power of our hearts: presence becomes movement, emotion becomes the beating of our hearts. It needs only a dark room with space to move and a PA system — very simple and very powerful.
An installation about neutron stars, inspired by the scientific sonifications of the Jodrell Bank Observatory, using data from the European Pulsar Timing Array. A dark room, four speakers, and the playful side of scientific sound.
A forceful, immersive, and mysterious experience: listeners feel the changing, rising tides of our world through a live sonification driven by CO₂ measurement. Inspired by Hyperobjects (Timothy Morton); data from the EU Global Surface Water centre and NASA Goddard. Currently seeking funding — and a sound company concerned about climate emergencies willing to lend 10+ waterproof speakers.
Since I discovered my passion for playing music, I have been intrigued by the world of improvisation. I can easily track down the moment when I became fascinated by it, almost obsessed: it was a cassette, a present from my saxophone teacher in south Argentina — a cassette that contained the sweet fire of John Coltrane.
Throughout my career I learned different languages, traveling from jazz and free jazz to contemporary free improvisation. Every place I lived, toured, visited, and people I met gave me something new.
I am still in the quest for new sounds in spontaneous creations: besides my academic research and composition projects, I run different groups where I wonder and wander through the colorful paths of improvisation.
photo: Silvia Musorzky
“The whole album got me in tension, under a sort of unpredictability spell; these two South American musicians took one tradition and created a sort of newborn genre using improvisation as the main process.”Sergio Castrillón — cellist, PhD in Philosophy
We explore the meaning of presence and space. Through our saxophones, guitar, and electronics, we shape a sound world unique to the place, in intimate relation to the audience's energy: Duende, the audience, the stage, the city, the forest — all breathing together. An electronic soundscape traveling between distorted high peaks and smooth immersive waves, the roots of our South-American tradition translated into abstraction.
“Their music draws from the ‘spiritual’ well, as their every note seems to form from somewhere deep and intangible, rising to the surface in expressive waves.”Paul Aqcuaro — FreeForm
An experimental and improvised duo rooted in the belief that art can transcend any physicality through music. The distance between Europe and South America is difficult to overcome — our performance activity happens when we visit each other.
darksonification coming soonThe library: the structuring methodology and algorithms behind every design, open on GitHub.GitHub repository
dark oceanThe North Atlantic, 2020–2023: water masses, temperature, salinity and nutrientsopen ♪
dark re-wildingKnepp Estate, 2023–2026: three years of a rewilding soundscapeopen ♪
dark pulsar1,297 pulsars: each one's physics as a grain cloud, its real rotation as a pulseopen ♪
dark sagasThe Icelandic sagas, read for feelings: emotion-focused researchopen ♪
A multimodal data display design system for entangled human–data relations.
My PhD project at the Intelligent Instruments Lab, University of Iceland, investigating interactive multimodal data design systems. It focuses on the pipelines that transform data into display, structured semiotically so that meaning is made along the way.
A bell-mounted speaker closes the tube, feeding the instrument's sounds and resonances back through itself.
The feedback saxophone, designed by Halldor Ulfarsson, uses a two-microphone configuration: one at the mouthpiece for frequency content, one at the bell capturing a chaotic, complex feedback signal. Closing different key combinations excites the feedback, while extended techniques such as multiphonics and circular breathing let the acoustic voice of the instrument interact with it.
A duo improvisation for feedback saxophone and a custom interface for feedback circuit sniffing, with Stefanos Vasilakis.
The saxophone relies on physical feedback: air, speaker and microphone form a closed acoustic loop inside the instrument. The circuit sniffing interface captures the electromagnetic field of circuit boards through coil inductors and processes it with algorithmic feedback (delay and waveguide mesh) into noise, clicks and resonances. Both improvisers first listen, then play, until the two instruments blur into one shared textural space.
Miguel Angel Crozzoli & Stefanos Vasilakis, Intelligent Instruments Lab, University of Iceland.
Two works for ensemble, I Am the Forest (2021) and I Am the Ocean (2022), composed from sonified data on deforestation and ocean contamination.
Calum Builder · Jūra Elena Šedytė · Valeria Miracapillo · Ida Nørby · Johannes Nästesjö · Miguel Angel Crozzoli
My contemporary experimental cumbia project.
Click a cover to listen, read, and open the score.
Composed from 20 years of deforestation data (Global Forest Watch), sonified into textural nets and spiking chants — the forest's health as music.
Built on ocean-contamination and surface-water data (EU JRC, NASA Goddard) — the dark beauty of a changing ocean, offering awareness and hope.
A four-part meditation on neutron stars — synergies between science and music, released with The Strangement Society.
On colliding black holes — composed in collaboration with Dr. Radoslaw Jan Wojtak of the DARK Cosmology Centre (Niels Bohr Institute).
Orchestral work grown from sonifications of dark-energy research and sounds from our solar system.
The oldest light in the universe, scored for electronic-acoustic orchestra.
Book a project, commission a piece, or just say hi — I'm always interested in new ideas.
miguelcrozzoli@outlook.com →
