Artist's Bio

Aaron Hoke Doenges is a sound artist and composer based in Nashville, TN. He graduated from Belmont University with a Master of Music in Composition, and since has had his work performed and installed locally, nationally, and internationally. The piece ‘Pouser’ was featured on National Public Radio, and ‘The Suicide of Freddie Mac’ and ‘Spy On, Eye, On I’ were represented by the SoundFjord Gallery in London, England and at the Dragonfly Festival in Göthenburg, Sweden. Paraclete Press published his piece ‘Apple Tree,’ for children’s choir, in 2015, and in 2018, he was contracted in install his interactive work Wade [Music for River and People] on the Siegenthaler Pedestrian Bridge in Nashville, TN.

Prior to graduating from Belmont, Aaron co-founded and co-directed SoundCrawl:Nashville, an international sound art festival held in conjunction with Nashville’s art crawl. He helped grow the event from a one evening event into a multi-day symposium with live performances, sound installations, and discussions. After leaving the SoundCrawl organization, Aaron entered the world of corporate data analytics where he was introduced to the materials and tools that shape his current creative practice. At the same time, he attended the Vanderbilt Divinity School where he studied the intersection of religion and the arts, and pursued coursework in ecological and social justice. He has since left the corporate world in order to pursue the arts more purposefully.

During his corporate season, Aaron’s work evolved from sound collage to interactive, data driven composition. He likes to share the compositional process with other people or entities, creating spaces where artist, audience and others can co-create. In order to achieve this, he uses two primary tools: freely available data, and motion detection within the installation site. In doing so, he takes advantage of current trends of data collection and manipulation and attempts create an experience that re-humanizes the information collected about the tangible world around us, and allows us to hear that world differently.

Taking cues from two seemingly oppositional philosophies, Doenges sees his work as a continuation of musical tradition. “The expressionists were all about control,” he says, “they assigned numbers to their notes and manipulated strings of them with math. But the experimentalists – they wanted to free music from their control. Combine these ideas with contemporary computing processes and you get mathematically determined music released from the will of the composer.” He takes the ideas of two historical periods and brings them together into his own expression.

Currently, Doenges is in the studio working on several pieces and planning future shows and presentations. For further information, or if you would like to schedule a presentation of his work, please contact Aaron Hoke Doenges here.