About

Eda Er is a composer, new media artist, and vocalist. She writes for voice, instruments, and live electronics, and builds performance systems in which physical gesture becomes sound and image in real time.

Eda Er composes works in which sound carries narrative weight — not as accompaniment to a story, but as the structure through which time, memory, and presence are shaped. Her pieces integrate extended vocal technique, electronics, and visual media, often placing the performer inside a system that listens and responds: the boundary between instrument, body, and environment is treated as porous rather than fixed.

Her practice is grounded in feminist new media studies and postcolonial theory. Augmented instruments become sites where suppressed traditions — those historically excluded from concert music — can re-enter contemporary musical thought; questions of who has been permitted to compose, to notate, and to be heard shape the forms this work takes. Grief, diaspora, and generational silence operate not as subjects of the music but as compositional forces within it, and technology, in her practice, serves as an instrument of reclamation rather than erasure.

Across her work, storytelling is not representation but architecture — an active force that gives sound its shape.

Her current research centers on Fluid Narratives, a performance system that transforms the traditional Turkish art of Ebru (marbling) into a sonic and visual instrument. Combining live video, multichannel sound, and computer vision, the system translates physical gesture into sound and image in real time.

The project treats material processes — water, pigment, breath — as compositional frameworks in their own right, expanding what notation can carry and what an instrument can be.

She also holds a degree in chemistry, which turns out to be unexpectedly useful when your instrument is a tray of water.

Eda Er’s work has been recognized with a series of competitive awards at UC Berkeley and beyond. She is the 2025–26 George Ladd Prix de Paris Fellow — the fellowship granted to one graduate composer each year for full-time artistic and scholarly research in Paris — and has been selected, for 2026–27, as a Berkeley Connect Fellow from a highly competitive pool.

Her research and composition have received the Peter Lyman Graduate Fellowship in New Media (2025) from the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Nicholas C. Christofilos, Jr. Memorial Prize in Music (2025), the Nicola de Lorenzo Prize in Music Composition — twice, in 2024 and 2025 — and the Emerging Composition Completion Grant from the ARTZenter Institute for orchestral work (2023), alongside research and dissertation support from BCNM and the UC Berkeley Graduate Division.

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), where she has taught music production, electronic composition, and sound design since 2021. She is active as both a composer and performer in Europe and the United States.

She also performs as ΞDΛ, an experimental dark-pop project that carries her compositional practice into electronic, club-adjacent audiovisual performance.

Based between the San Francisco Bay Area, US, and Strasbourg, France.