About Axel Mulder


Axel Mulder's main research and artistic interests are in gesture & human movement and sound & music, and their relation.

Summary

Axel Mulder has been an active participant of the art and technology community for over 30 years. It all started in 1987 when he designed his own instrumented dataglove and a pink bodysuit for MIDI real-time control. With academic degrees in physics (Drs RUG 1989) and kinesiology (PhD SFU 1998) as well as training in music and dance he has deeply explored the many disciplines that study real-time live performance resulting in peer-reviewed papers about motion capture, virtual musical instruments and 3D sound sculpting. Through his company Infusion Systems Ltd., which makes and markets the I-CubeX line of products for development of interactive media, he has developed a thorough understanding of sensor technology and its application in the arts and beyond. He has engaged with many universities and companies around the world for consulting, reviewing, lecturing and teaching. His main occupation is running Infusion Systems while also holding a position as adjunct professor at McGill University.

Education

He received the Drs. degree ("Doctorandus", approx. equivalent to an M.Sc. degree) in physics from the Rijks Universiteit Groningen, the Netherlands in January 1989. He is also an amateur musician (wind instruments) interested in new ways of performing music. The combination of these interests lead him in January 1987 to start development of his own instrumented dataglove and bodysuit for MIDI real time control, which were used in his own and other artist's performances. In October 1998 he completed his Ph.D. degree on design of virtual three-dimensional instruments for sound control at the School of Kinesiology, Simon Fraser University in Canada. He published a number of papers on Virtual Musical Instruments and Sound Sculpting. Part of his research has been performed at the ATR MIC labs in Kyoto, Japan, where he had an appointment as a researcher from February 1997 until February 1998. His interest in applications of technology for dance resulted in the creation of XSpasm.com and iDance. Since January 2006 he holds a position as adjunct professor in music technology at the SPC lab in the department of Music Research of McGill's Schulich school of music.

Work

After his physics study he worked from June 1990 until June 1993 as a scientific publisher at Elsevier in the Netherlands, during which he managed amongst others the startup of the journal Languages of Design. In October 1995 he founded and is currently president of Infusion Systems Ltd., which makes and markets the I-CubeX line of products. Often through his involvement with Infusion Systems, he acts as a consultant for academic research projects such as at McGill University, University of British Columbia and University of Western Sydney, and gives talks and workshops such as at RV99 (Candido Mendes University), CCRMA (Stanford University), CNMAT (University of California at Berkeley), IRCAM, Medialogy (Aalborg University), DIST (University of Genoa), Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero, and various other institutions. In his function as president of Infusion Systems he has successfully managed Canadian MITACS and NSERC R&D grants and supervised over a dozen research employees, contractors and graduate students, all of whom have continued their careers successfully. He is or has been involved with various events and publications such as ICMC (reviewer), NIME (reviewer), SIGGRAPH 2009 / 2010 / 2011 (music/audio committee, unified jury, studio participant), as well as Leonardo Digital Reviews (reviewer).

Publications

Axel's publications are available on the web.

Contact Axel by email at Infusion Systems.