Monica Bolles: talk, listening, discussion

This presentation traces the evolution of the artistic and technical practice of digital artist, composer, and audio engineer Monica Bolles. Drawing on over a decade of experience designing performance engines and composing for immersive, multichannel audio environments, Bolles examines her approach to engaging with space as an active, performable instrument.

She explores how movement and gesture inform dynamic, responsive compositions in which sound can breathe, transform, and reorganize in real time—creating moments of immersion, disorientation, inquiry, and embodied understanding. Through this lens, multichannel environments emerge not merely as technical infrastructures, but as living fields of interaction where composition, improvisation, and spatial design converge.

Monica Bolles has been working with spatial audio since 2011, when she first gained access to her local planetarium’s 15.1 channel surround system. Since then, she has developed custom toolsets in Max MSP and explored emerging technologies to craft textured soundscapes that explore space, movement, and interaction. As both a technician and artist, she collaborates with artists and composers to bring their work into immersive spatial environments, while also producing her own large-scale multichannel installations, exhibited on systems ranging from 8 to 140 channels.

Monica co-hosts the Immersive Audio Podcast and the Spatial Audio Meetups through NOTAM. She frequently curates, moderates, and presents workshops and panels on spatial audio, with appearances at notable events such as the New Visions Festival, SXSW, IRCAM Forums, Ableton Loop, IMERSA Summit, and NIME, among others.