Carlos Guedes

Born in Porto, Carlos Guedes has a multifaceted career as a composer, with numerous commissions for dance, theatre and film, as well as conventional concert music. His work has been performed at numerous festivals and concert venues, including The Kitchen, Joyce SoHo, Judson Church, ArCo, De Waag, SXSW, the São João National Theatre, SIGGRAPH, Shanghai eArts, Casa da Música, Expo ’98, Expo 2020, NYUAD Arts Centre, Porto 2001, Guimarães 2012, the Beijing Modern Music Festival 2016, the Sharjah Flag Island Festival, and the Asia Culture Centre (Gwangju, South Korea).

He pursues an eclectic musical practice that combines various approaches using musical technology (industrial music, techno and spectral music), in work that is collaborative by nature, whether with other art forms or with other musicians.

In 2021–2022, Carlos Guedes was composer-in-residence at Drumming GP, where he developed a cycle for percussion and electronic music with fixed media entitled ‘Time Poetries’. He recently released the album ‘Shadows and Reflections’ (2021) with his duo Chess, alongside the Danish pianist Nikolaj Hess.

At the same time, he carries out research projects aimed at deepening our understanding of the music of the Arabian Gulf. He is the co-founder of the Music and Sound Cultures group at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), a group dedicated to multi-disciplinary music research that develops methodologically hybrid projects combining traditional and digital approaches from the humanities with artificial intelligence.

Carlos Guedes is an associate professor of music at NYUAD, with affiliations with the university’s Computer Engineering and the Music Technology programme at NYU Steinhardt.