"Nicolas Collins (born March 26, 1954, in New York City) is a composer of mostly electronic music, a sound artist and writer. He received his BA and MA from Wesleyan University, and his PhD from the University of East Anglia. Upon graduating from Wesleyan, he was a Watson Fellow.

In the 1980s Collins was "a pioneer in the use of microcomputers in live performance, and has made extensive use of 'home-made' electronic circuitry, radio, found sound material, and transformed musical instruments." Trained in the experimental compositional tradition of Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, and David Tudor, all of whom he worked with closely, Collins also immersed himself in the New York Improvised Music scene of the 1980s. Using home-built instruments that combined circuitry, simple computers and traditional instruments such as trombones and slide guitars, he collaborated and performed with Tom Cora, Shelley Hirsch, Christian Marclay, Zeena Parkins, John Zorn and others. Collins's compositions frequently ask performers to respond to unpredictable musical cues, as in Devil's Music (1985), in which the performer DJs with snippets of live scanning radio, or Still Lives (1993), in which a solo trumpet player improvises against a skipping CD of Renaissance brass music. More recent works include In Memoriam Michel Waiswicz (2008), in which a birthday candle 'plays' a light-sensitive circuit until it burns down; and Speak, Memory (2016) in which the digital data of photographic images is played as sound in a room, where it is allowed to decay, and the decay is reflected in the photograph, which changes and eventually disappears as sound fades to silence.

As a studio artist at PS1 in 1983-84, Collins exhibited sound sculptures of 'backwards guitars'-found instruments modified so the pick-ups resonated the guitar strings with live radio signals. Subsequent installation projects at Musée Malraux (Le Havre), Gemeentemuseum of the Hague (now named the Kunstmuseum), ZKM (Karlsruhe); and the Sonambiente sound art festival (Berlin), featured performing devices such a model train that 'plays'a long amplified wire, as well as multi-channel video works.

Collins' musical compositions have been presented at venues around the world, ranging from CBGB to the Concertgebouw. As a composer-performer he has presented concerts and workshops on every continent save Antarctica.

He has also been active as a curator, policy adviser, and board member for numerous cultural organizations, since first taking on the post of Curator of Music Performances and Sound Installations at PS1/The Clocktower (now MoMA PS1) in 1985. In 1992 he left New York to become Artistic Director of STEIM (Studio for Electro Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam, and later moved to Berlin on a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) composer-in-residence fellowship. From 1997 to 2017 Collins served as Editor-in-Chief of the Leonardo Music Journal, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the MIT Press., and he sits on the editorial boards of Resonance: the Journal of Sound and Culture (University of California Press), Acoustic Arts & Artifacts: Technology, Aesthetics, Communication (Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice), the Journal of Sound Studies (The Netherlands), and Resonancias - Revista de Investigación Musical (Chile).

Collins is Professor of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has been guest professor at Institute of Sonology, Royal Conservatory of The Hague; Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany; Universität der Künste Berlin; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago; and Technische Universität Berlin, among other locations.

In 2006 Collins' book Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking was published by Routledge, and a second edition was published in 2009. A broadly expanded third edition, released in the summer of 2020, documents the grass-roots spread of 'Hardware Hacking' through local art and music organizations and collectives, often in conjunction with feminist and/or regional cultural concerns, from Brazil to Indonesia. He was a major influence on the establishment of the Musical Electronics Library in New Zealand.

Collins lives and works in Berlin, Chicago and rural Massachusetts."

"Born 1961 in Nuremberg, she studied the visual arts, which still have an important influence on her music. Since moving to Hamburg in 1982 she has been involved in free improvisation and experimental music. Since then she has "established a distinguished grammar of sounds beyond the open trumpet" (jazzdimensions.de). She works mainly on extending the sounding possiblities of the trumpet by using splitting sounds, multiphonics and granular sounds and has developed her own extended techniques and preparations for producing these sounds. Besides this material research she is especially interested in the relation between sound and silence.Since 2006 Birgit Ulher works with radios and uses extended speakers, fed with radio noise in her trumpet mutes. The trumpet functions as an acoustic chamber and modulates the radio noise, thus the trumpet is transmitter and receiver at the same time. Her work with radio is documented on the CD 'Radio Silence No More', released 2007 on Olof Bright.The same concept is the basis of the duo with Gregory Büttner, where Büttner plays his sound contributions via a laptop with an output to a small speaker which Ulher uses a s trumpet mute.Their first CD 'Tehricks' based on this concept was released 2009.She performs solo, with dancers, working ensembles, and one-time collaborations with musicians from around the world.

She has been organising the festival of improvised music Real Time Music Meeting for over ten years.

Music performances in Europe, USA, South America, Russia and the Middle East, together with UNSK (Birgit Ulher / Martin Küchen / Lise-Lott Norelius / Raymond Strid), the Trio PUT (with Ulrich Phillipp and Roger Turner), Nordzucker (with Lars Scherzberg and Michael Maierhof), Heiner Metzger, Martin Klapper, Tim Hodgkinson, Dorothea Schürch, Rhodri Davies, Robyn Schulkowsky, Michael Zerang, Damon Smith, Lou Mallozzi, Gino Robair, Ute Wassermann, Albert Márkos, Sven Ake Johansson, Gene Coleman, Ernesto Rodrigues, Heddy Boubaker, Tim Perkis, Bryan Eubanks, Ariel Shibolet, Christoph Schiller and Sean Meehan, Forbes Graham, Leonel Kaplan, Gregory Büttner, Lucio Capece, Eric Leonardson and Bill Hsu.

Lectures/Workshops at Queen's University of Belfast, Haifa University, SAIC - School of The Art Institut of Chicago, Hochschule für Musik Basel, Workshop Area Sismica in Forlí, Italy, Workshop Anáhuac 33, Mexico City, Workshop Galeria Mérida, Mérida Mexico and Certain Sundays, Berlin.

Residencies at AIR Krems, Austria 2017, ArtInRealeases - GIS Studio - AIR Mexico 2016, Mexico City, Künstlerhaus Lukas, Ahrenshoop 2015, QO-2 werkplaats, Brüssel, 2010, Casa Zia Lina, Elba, Italy, Foundation Thyll-Dürr, 2001 and 2003, Boswil, MKS, Switzerland, 1994"