Doctoral Researcher
Paulo Dantas (Rio de Janeiro/Brazil, 1981) works as musician and sound artist, teacher and sound technician. For the past years he's been teaching Experimental Music and Music Analysis at UNIRIO (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's State), with a special interest on artistic uses of the practice of field recording; on the impacts of notions of ‘indeterminacy’ and 'collaboration' on creative processes; on providing access to basic music production techniques on softwares that cost no money; and on the teaching of music analysis with focus on (mainly) 17th to 21st century concert music repertoire.
His topics of interest as a researcher resulted in a deeper engagement and collaboration with contemporary music ensembles and artists of the current Brazilian and international underground and institutional music/arts scenes (Thiago Rocha Pitta, Beatriz Elena Martinez, Ricardo Basbaum, Sylvia Hinz and Jeanne Strieder, Xabier Erkizia, Ute Wassermann and Thomas Rohrer, Lucie Vítková, Alexandre Fenerich, Michael Winter, etc.). The scope of those collaborations ranges from shared creative activities to conceiving and executing technical work such as recording, mixing and mastering, as well as organizing concerts and seminars, publishing articles, playlists and compilations.
In his recent artistic production, he has been interested in promoting dialogues between music, phonography, sound design and other art forms, through speculative uses of different recording devices, synthesizers, texts and other objects. Recent performances at festivals based in Brazil (SomaRumor 2019; Novas Frequências 2019 and 2020) and in other countries (Oscillation 2019 - Belgium; Brazilian Sound Art Exhibition / Festival Dystopie 2020 - Germany). He worked as director and resident composer with Abstrai Ensemble (Rio de Janeiro), SCHLAG! (Belo Horizonte) and Agora (Rio de Janeiro) and was an invited composer at EMS - Elektronmusikstudion (Sweden). He was a resident artist in the programs Taizai - Katsudou - Izu (Shuzenji, Japan), The Participatory Art Residencies (Interfaces/Q-O2, Belgium), the Virtual Partner Residency (Goethe Institut, Brazil/Germany) and recently accepted in the Research Residency program TOKAS - Tokyo Arts and Space (Japan). He is currently a docARTES (Orpheus Instituut - Belgium/Gent) PhD candidate.
