Owen Vallis
Biography
As an artist and co-founder of FlipMu, Owen Vallis is fascinated by the intersection of sound and technology. This curiosity has driven Owen to explore a diverse range of projects including producing other musicians, composing his own music, building various analog and digital audio processors, and designing new hardware interfaces for musical expression and interaction. Having graduated from the MTIID program at California Institute of the Arts, Owen is currently pursuing his PhD in Sonic Arts at the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington.
Education and Current Work
Over the past 10 years, Owen has worked as an engineer in studios around Nashville Tennessee and Los Angeles, built a recording facility from the ground up, produced and mixed several notable bands from the Los Angeles area, had production work featured in major motion films, and worked for leading ribbon microphone manufacturer Royer Labs.
In the spring of 2008, along with Jordan Hochenbaum, Owen co-founded FlipMu to begin developing new hardware interfaces for musical expression. The first instrument, Bricktable, explored the potential of large format multi-touch screens for musical expression. This work was followed by the Arduinome project, a port of the popular Momone instrument to the affordable and readily available Arduino microcontroller. The Arduinome has since grown to include a global community of users who have greatly expanded the original functionality of the Monome device.
Owen’s work has been featured in Wired, Future Music, and XLR8R magazine, on Processing.org, and shown at events such as NASA's Yuri's Night, Google I/O and the Berlin Open conference in 2009.
