About

Carl Faia was born in 1962 at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. He studied composition at UC Santa Barbara, Florida State University, and — on a Fulbright grant — at the Royal Academy of Music in Denmark, where his teachers included Per Nørgård and Karl Aage Rasmussen. He moved to France in the early nineties and has never left.

Since 1995 he has worked as a composer and computer music designer — at IRCAM in Paris, at CIRM in Nice, and as a long-term collaborator with Studio Art Zoyd in Valenciennes. That last relationship produced some of his most lasting work, including a decade-long pedagogical project with composer André Serre-Milan built on a simple but radical premise: that you learn electroacoustic music by making it, not by studying it first. Each year the work culminated in Sonoscopie, a multimedia spectacle created entirely by the students. It worked.

As a computer music designer he has realised live electronics for composers including Jonathan Harvey, James Dillon, Luca Francesconi, Fausto Romitelli, and Alejandro Viñao, in festivals across Europe from Ars Musica to MaerzMusik to the Holland Festival. That practice — technical, interpretive, deeply collaborative — informs everything he makes.

From 2009 to 2024 he was Lecturer in Sonic Arts at Brunel University London, where he completed a PhD and ran the Sonic Arts programme. He now works independently from Toulouse, where the music continues — new compositions, ongoing research into wave phenomena and spatial sound, and through Imperfect Tense, the design and building of custom instruments and interactive controllers for electronic music performance.