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Austin Oting Har is a composer, writer, performer, and new music advocate with a background in music technology and ancient philosophy. His works utilize ancient concepts, languages, and instruments, digital sound design and creative coding, bridging traditional Western and Eastern, experimental electronic, and contemporary classical music worlds. His technology-mediated composition and performance practice explores timbral, microtonal, and rhythmic materials, focusing on the interplay between semantic, organic, and algorithmic processes. Phonaesthetics informs his creative writing and translation, where the sound of words is as important as their meaning. His collaborations extend globally, engaging with interaction designers, linguists, poets, and cultural bearers across Australia, Europe, the US, and Japan in his work intersecting Greek tragedy, Japanese noh theatre, and renga poetry with contemporary, intercultural music and literature.

An Associate Artist of the Australian Music Centre, Austin's music has been released internationally on the labels Neuma Records (US) and Possible Futures (Germany), commissioned by the activist opera company White Snake Projects (US) and festivals including Dark Mofo (Australia), Berlin Atonal and MaerzMusik (Germany), and Reverberator (US), and published by BabelScores (France). Awards include a Special Prize in the Ise-Shima International Composition Competition (Japan), the Carillon Society of Australia Composition Competition (Australia), and the Create NSW Arts and Cultural Fund (NSW Government, Australia). His research has been published in Context: Journal of Music Research (Melbourne University Press), Leonardo (MIT Press), and Organised Sound (Cambridge University Press). Recent and upcoming conference presentations include the International Conference of the European Association for Japanese Studies (Poznań), Analytical Approaches to World Musics (Durham), Early Recording Associations Conference (Glasgow), the IAFOR International Conference on Arts & Humanities in Hawaii (Honolulu), Principles of Music Composing (Vilnius), TENOR International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation (Beijing), MACCM New Music Festival (Ohio), and the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (Canberra). His poetry has been published in journals including Modern Haiku, Acorn, Presence, seashores, hedgerow, and tsuri-dōrō.

He earned his DMA in Composition and Music Technology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, MMus in Music Technology Innovation (summa cum laude) at Berklee College of Music, and MSc in Ancient Philosophy (with merit) at the University of Edinburgh. He received the Sydney Moss Scholarship via the University of Sydney and the Research Training Program stipend via the Australian Government. He first played violin in orchestras for musical theatre productions, then worked as a project coordinator and music engineer for commercial and film music in Hollywood. He also has worked as a senior high school English tutor in Sydney, an audio-visual technician in San Francisco, and a sound engineer for jazz and contemporary music concerts in the US Virgin Islands.

He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Residential Community-Engaged Arts and Humanities (RCAH) in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Music at the University of the Virgin Islands. He was a Visiting Composer (Artist in Residence) at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California, Berkeley, an editor for the Sydney Undergraduate Journal of Musicology, and has supported and developed initiatives for underserved youth in the US Virgin Islands and California. He is the founder and director of Bogue Street Records, an interdisciplinary label for Michigan artists.

Austin Oting Har — current to August 2026