Abby Aresty

  • Technical Director and Lecturer

Areas of Study

Education

  • BM in composition, Eastman School of Music, 2006
  • MM in composition, University of Michigan, 2008
  • DMA in composition, University of Washington, 2012

Biography

Abby Aresty is a composer and sound artist who uses technology to facilitate unexpected interactions between people, the built environment, and the natural world. Her projects are playful, meditative listening interventions that seek to provoke audience reflection on habitual listening practices in contemporary sonic environments.

Aresty’s site-specific installations have been featured in local and national news outlets; Paths II: The Music of Trees, a temporary installation in Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum, was featured in an interview with Melissa Block on NPR’s All Things Considered and was hailed as “otherworldly” and “sometimes eerie, sometimes transportingly lovely,” by the Seattle Times.

Aresty has presented her research in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong, in conferences including ICMC, Balance/Unbalance, ISEA, and Sonic Environments. She has held fellowships at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, Grinnell College, and the Acoustic Ecology Lab at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts.

 

Notes

Abby Aresty presents on course with Rachel Gibson '20 at conference

June 29, 2021

TIMARA Technical Director and Lecturer Abby Aresty and Rachel Gibson '20 presented their course, "Crafting Sound: Simple Sonic Interfaces for Education and Creation," at the international virtual Interaction Design and Children ACM conference. Gibson, Aresty, and Ian Moo '21 also presented their works-in-progress paper, "Apples and Oranges: Comparing Crafty Sonic Circuits for Electronics Education," at IDC.

Abby Aresty presents award-winning paper with Rachel Gibson '20

June 21, 2021

Abby Aresty, technical director and lecturer in TIMARA, and Rachel Gibson '20 presented their paper "Changing GEAR: The Girls Electronic Arts Retreat's Teaching Interfaces for Musical Expression" virtually at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression in NYU Shanghai, June 14-18, 2021. The paper has won an award (Learn to Play/Play to Learn) and honorable mention (Pamela Z diversity award) at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference.

Abby Aresty presents at conference

November 12, 2020

Conservatory Technical Director and Lecturer Abby Aresty and Rachel Gibson '20 presented a workshop on STEAM education and experiential, community-engaged learning at the 2020 AAC&U Transforming STEM Higher Education Conference.

Abby Aresty Presents at Conference

July 21, 2020

Technical Director and Lecturer Abby Aresty and Rachel Gibson '20 presented the "Crafting Sound Workshop: Accessible Interfaces for Education and Creation," at the remote New Interfaces for Musical Expression 2020 conference. 

ArtiFACT Project Team Selected for CODEX Institute

July 12, 2020

The ArtiFACT project team, including Abby Aresty, technical director and lecturer for Technology in Music and Related Arts; Larissa Fekete, director of English for Speakers of Other Languages; Abe Reshad, director of the Cooper International Learning Center; and research assistant and computer science major Ivy Fu '22, was selected to participate in the inaugural Ohio Five CODEX Institute. The institute provides for a cohort of faculty to work in collaboration with instructional technologists, librarians, and students from the Ohio Five to redesign or augment existing courses with new approaches that foster critical engagement through digital technologies. 

Abby Aresty Teaches Workshop in Hong Kong

June 18, 2019

TIMARA Technical Director and Lecturer Abby Aresty taught a workshop on multimodal, interactive storytelling for 40 college students from around the world as part of a summer institute on humanitarian entrepreneurship at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

News

Who is Abby Aresty?

August 23, 2021

One might expect a technical director and lecturer in the TIMARA department to have a related interest in sound, but did you know that Abby Aresty wore a traffic cone on her head in her preschool class photo? Learn more about Aresty in this installment of Who Am I?

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