Plenary Address

Bruno Louchouarn, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Music and Cognitive Science, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA

Collaboration in a Distributed Cognitive Ecosystem; Cross-Disciplinary Lessons from Arts and Science

French-Mexican Composer and cognitive scientist Bruno Louchouarn’s music has been performed at venues internationally. He has extensive film, theater, multimedia installations, and dance credits, ranging from the futuristic cantina music in the classic film Total Recall to a sound installation at the 2012 Liverpool Biennial UK, immersive works such as Day For Night, a 12-hour film and music installation commissioned by GLOW 2010 Santa Monica and featured at Transatlantyk International Film Festival 2011, Poland, and the multimedia opera Voices in the Dust about the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, with a book by Juan Felipe Herrera, poet laureate of California.  His musical compositions are informed by his studies in cognitive science and often focus on narrative, emotions, and distributed cognition, as well as multimodal integration in the interaction of music and the moving image. Most of his work is cross-disciplinary in nature and he has collaborated with numerous directors, writers, choreographers, performer, and visual artists.

After graduate studies in artificial intelligence in Paris Dr. Louchouarn obtained a Ph.D. in music composition at UCLA where he studied with Paul Chihara, Ian Krouse, and Jerry Goldsmith.  He is Associate Professor and teaches music, multimedia, and cognitive science at Occidental College.