Ben Houge

Hello, I'm Ben Houge, and this is my website. I'm an internationally active American artist operating at the nexus of music composition, video games, performance, sound installation, and digital art. I recently moved to Valencia, Spain, where I'm helping to develop and teach in the new Music Technology Innovation master's program at Berklee College of Music. For more details, check out my full bio, or to see what I've been up to lately, check out the news page or visit my blog.

Here are a few recent highlights:

I've been working on a series of food operas with chef Jason Bond, as featured on NPR, Kill Screen, and New Music Box.
I composed an algorithmic soundtrack for the dance performance Please Be Seated by UK-based New Movement Collective, performed at Southbank Centre in London, Royal Theatre Winchester, La Rambleta in Valencia, and the Centro Cultural de Picanya.
I gave a talk on "Optimizing Audio for Mobile Development" at the Game Developers Conference in Shanghai in October.
I premiered my new composition The Tomb of the Grammarian Lysias, a setting of a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy for voice and audience members' mobile devices, at the joint International Computer Music Conference/Sound and Music Computing Conference in Athens last September and performed it again at the Music Acoustica festival at Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music in October.
My new choral work "Was ist heilig" was commissioned and premiered by Emmanuel Church in Boston on July 28, 2013.
I've presented two papers on my work at the MUME 2012 and MUME 2013 conferences on musical metacreation.
My sound installation Landscape with Water and Woodblocks was exhibited at OV Gallery in Shanghai in September 2012.
I organized a pretty packed game music concert at Berklee in September 2012.
During summer 2012, my real-time data visualization piece Cycles, Tides, and Seasons ran at the Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion.
I've had another seven-channel video piece, Model Lightbox, in rotation at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.
My video piece Shanghai Traces has been running at The Glamour Bar in Shanghai since 2010.
My choral work "Lao Zhang" was premiered by Dale Warland at the Chorus America conference in June 2012.
I was an artist in residence at MIT in February 2012.
I lived in Shanghai, China, from 2004 to 2010, and I returned for several performances and events in July/August 2012.
I headed up audio for Tom Clancy's EndWar and other projects at Ubisoft Shanghai from 2004-2008.
I wrote the soundtrack for the RPG Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, which Forbes just listed as one of the top 12 video game soundtracks of all time, during the seven years I developed audio for games at Sierra from 1996-2003. The music was also cited in PC Gamer's roundup of the top PC games of all time (Arcanum was #60).