Composer·Multimedia Artist·Vocalist
Working at the intersection of voice, technology, and audiovisual performance
Her work positions storytelling as a compositional system across sound, image, and performance.
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Eda Er is a contemporary classical composer, multimedia artist, and vocalist working at the intersection of contemporary classical music, live electronics, and audiovisual performance.
Her practice explores embodiment, feminist storytelling, and the relationship between sound, image, and physical gesture through immersive and interdisciplinary forms.
Working across composition, performance, and new media, Eda Er develops works in which sound functions as a narrative agent — shaping and transforming the experience of time, space, and identity.
Her compositions integrate extended vocal techniques, electronic sound, and visual media, often placing the performer within systems that blur the boundaries between instrument, body, and environment. Through this approach, her work engages with themes of belonging, memory, and the politics of voice, creating spaces where personal and collective histories intersect.
Across her work, storytelling functions not as representation, but as structure — an active force that shapes sound, performance, and perception.
A central focus of her current work is Fluid Narratives, an interdisciplinary system that transforms the traditional Turkish art of Ebru (marbling) into a performative instrument. Combining live video, multichannel sound, and algorithmic processes, the system translates physical gesture into sonic and visual structures in real time.
Positioned at the intersection of composition, performance, and research, this work expands the role of notation, proposing alternative models in which material processes and embodied actions function as compositional frameworks.
Fluid Narratives →Her work has been performed internationally by ensembles and institutions including the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Multilatérale, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Ensemble Crash, Ensemble Musikfabrik, and the Nordic Trombone Quartet.
Eda Er is currently completing her PhD in Music Composition with a Designated Emphasis in New Media at the University of California, Berkeley (CNMAT / BCNM). She is the recipient of the Prix de Paris and is active as both a composer and performer in Europe and the United States.
Chercheuse doctorale invitée, Université de Strasbourg.
Eda Er's research sits at the intersection of artistic practice and critical inquiry, working across composition, performance, feminist theory, and new media technology. Her central questions concern how embodied knowledge — the knowledge held in gesture, breath, material, and cultural memory — can be translated into and through technological systems without being flattened or neutralized by them.
Her work draws on feminist new media studies, postcolonial theory, and the philosophy of technology to interrogate what it means to compose with systems that remember, listen, and respond. She is particularly interested in the design of augmented instruments as sites of feminist practice — tools that do not simply amplify but that reconfigure the relationship between performer, material, and audience. Central to this is a concern with who has historically been permitted to compose, to notate, and to be heard, and what new forms of authorship become possible when the instrument itself is built from suppressed traditions.
Methodologically, she develops compositional systems grounded in material process — water, pigment, breath, surface — and translates these into notational frameworks, live electronics, and spatial audio structures. Extended vocal techniques, multichannel diffusion, and real-time computer vision form the technical substrate of her practice, always in service of a deeper inquiry into embodiment, rupture, and cultural transmission.
Her research also engages with questions of grief and healing as compositional forces — the ways that loss, diaspora, and generational silence shape the forms that artistic work takes, and how new media technologies can serve as instruments of reclamation rather than erasure.
Fluid Narratives is Eda Er's doctoral artistic research project, transforming the traditional Turkish art of Ebru — Ottoman water marbling, historically practiced by women — into an augmented instrument for live composition and feminist storytelling. The project develops a custom performance system integrating contact microphones, computer vision, transducers, and multichannel diffusion, in which the physical act of marbling becomes a real-time compositional gesture: pigment dropped into water, combed into form, translated into sound and image simultaneously.
The primary finished work under this research is Instructions for Not Disappearing — a piece for solo soprano, Ebru instrument, live electronics, live video, and movement. The work is structured around a five-section alchemical arc moving from Prima Materia to Gold, using the transformative logic of alchemy as a metaphor for the processes of grief, reclamation, and survival that animate the project's feminist and postcolonial concerns.
Central to the research is the development of an Ebru Notation System — a gestural score language that maps the physical vocabulary of marbling (drop, comb, pull, swirl, veil) onto musical parameters, enabling Ebru to function not only as visual art but as a compositional tool with its own internal grammar. This system bridges the intuitive, improvisatory quality of traditional Ebru with the structural demands of contemporary composition and live performance.
To perform is to transmute. To compose is to reclaim. To create is to survive.
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▶Entre Deux Rivages (2021, Nyxphere) is a collaborative album created with jazz musician Simon Sieger, released under the duo name äbädä. The record moves between contemporary classical composition, electronic sound design, and improvisation — tracing landscapes of memory and transition across its eight tracks.
Selected ensembles and soloists who have premiered or commissioned works.
Earlier performances and events from 2016–2022 are available on request — info@edaer.me
Materials for presenters, curators, journalists, and programmers.
Eda Er is a contemporary classical composer, multimedia artist, and vocalist. Her work spans live electronics, audiovisual performance, and extended vocal techniques, exploring embodiment, feminist storytelling, and the relationship between sound, image, and physical gesture. She is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley (CNMAT/BCNM) and recipient of the Prix de Paris. Her music has been performed internationally by the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Ensemble Multilatérale, Ensemble Crash, and the Nordic Trombone Quartet.
Eda Er is a contemporary classical composer, multimedia artist, and vocalist working at the intersection of live electronics, audiovisual performance, and feminist storytelling. Her practice develops works in which sound functions as a narrative agent — shaping the experience of time, space, and identity through immersive and interdisciplinary forms. Her compositions integrate extended vocal techniques, electronic sound, and visual media, often placing the performer within systems that blur the boundaries between instrument, body, and environment.
A central focus of her current work is Fluid Narratives, an interdisciplinary research project that transforms the traditional Turkish art of Ebru (marbling) into a performative instrument for live composition. Combining live video, multichannel sound, and algorithmic processes, the system translates physical gesture into sonic and visual structures in real time — proposing alternative models in which material processes and embodied actions function as compositional frameworks.
Her work draws on feminist new media studies, postcolonial theory, and the philosophy of technology to interrogate what it means to compose with systems that remember, listen, and respond. She is particularly interested in the design of augmented instruments as sites of feminist practice — tools that reconfigure the relationship between performer, material, and audience.
Eda Er is currently completing her PhD in Music Composition with a Designated Emphasis in New Media at the University of California, Berkeley (CNMAT / BCNM). She is the recipient of the Prix de Paris and Chercheuse doctorale invitée at the Université de Strasbourg. Her work has been performed internationally by ensembles and institutions including the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Multilatérale, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Ensemble Crash, Ensemble Musikfabrik, and the Nordic Trombone Quartet.
Performance and press images. For high-resolution originals, please get in touch.
Selected recordings and video documentation.
▶▶▶▶▶▶Full curriculum vitae available upon request. Please get in touch.