About

Margaret Schedel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at Stony Brook University. She has an interdisciplinary career blending classical training in cello and composition, sound/audio data research, and innovative computational arts education. Her work transcends the boundaries of disparate fields to produce integrated work at the nexus of computation and the arts. Her diverse creative output includes interactive multimedia opera The King Listens, virtual reality experiences, sound art, video game scores, and compositions for a wide variety of classical instruments or custom controllers with interactive audio and video processing. Margaret holds a certificate in Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and currently serves as the co-director of computer music. She leads the Making Sense of Data Workgroup at the Institute of Advanced Computational Science, reflecting her focus on computational arts and data-driven creative practices.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Visual arts
• Art
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Acoustics
• Law
• Physics
• Human–computer interaction
• Multimedia
• Gender studies
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• From Infinity to Infinity

  2025-11-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  From its origins in community spaces to its development within academic institutions, this chapter examines the intersections of hip hop and electroacoustic music (EA), highlighting their shared ethos of radical experimentation and technological innovation. By focusing on production techniques, the authors reveal the parallels and convergences between these genres including hip hop’s sophisticated micro-timbral variations and EA’s complex micro-rhythmic structures. This analysis spans the historical evolution of each genre, using 15-year intervals for EA (starting in 1948) and 10-year intervals for hip hop (starting in 1975). The research, grounded in direct engagement with the practices and communities of both genres, aims to uncover how production tools have bridged technical and artistic boundaries, fostering new possibilities for musical innovation. Additionally, the chapter explores the sociocultural challenges both genres face, particularly regarding exclusion based on gender and class. The research aims to deepen the understanding of hip hop and EA’s dynamic evolutions and their implications for contemporary music production, education, and cultural expression. The investigation is enriched by the unique perspectives of the co-authors in EA and hip hop, respectively.

  PublisherDOI

• Error-based biofeedback for gait training in Parkinson's disease

  Parkinsonism & Related Disorders · 2025-04-17

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Blending physical and cyber infrastructures to enable seamless telematic and in-person presentations

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2024-10-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Connecting laptops to projectors and PAs during conferences often frustrates presenters and organizers, especially for hybrid events. Issues such as incorrect input sources, loose connections, resolution mismatches, incompatible adapters, damaged cables, outdated drivers, projector settings, HDCP incompatibility, projectors hijacking audio, and operating system discrepancies can arise. These problems are worsened by tight schedules, with back-to-back presentations involving different personal computers with unique issues. Some conferences use an on-site computer to mitigate these issues, but this approach has its own challenges. These include inconsistent presentation slide behavior (fonts, images, transitions), the absence of necessary software or plugins for interactive demonstrations, and the need to upload slides well in advance. This paper presents a system that uses standard remote conferencing software (e.g., Zoom), a simple mixer, a PA, and an Internet connection—all typically available in presentation settings—to facilitate seamless presentations without physical connections between computers and projectors. First implemented at the 2022 IRCAM Forum at NYU, this system has since been successfully deployed at the 2023 WFAE and 2024 Web Audio Conferences, proving its effectiveness in ensuring smooth and uninterrupted presentations.

  PublisherDOI

• VIMEO Livestream Concert: The Telematic Circle—Celebrating Free Music performed live over the internet (https://vimeo.com/event/4551097/281fe79260)

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2024-10-01

  articleSenior author

  In the spirit of a virtual meeting, the Technical Committee Musical Acoustics hosts a telematic concert featuring freely improvised music in the classic and jazz avant-garde tradition. In 2007, we started a Telematic Circle between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Stanford University, performing free music weekly between two music seminars led by Pauline Oliveros at RPI and Chris Chafe at Stanford. This project was possible through a new low-latency INET2 internet network, Chafe’s low-latency audio software, Jacktrip, and the adequacy of free music for such collaborations. Over the years, the Telematic Circle expanded to other institutions in the US and other countries. This concert will highlight a three-way connection between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford University, and Suny Stonybrook, featuring local musicians from all three institutions. The concert can be viewed via a VIMEO Livestream (https://vimeo.com/event/4551097/281fe79260).

  PublisherDOI

• MAPPING IN THE EMERGENCY: DESIGNING A HYPERLOCAL AND SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS SONIFIED MAP OF COVID-19 IN SUFFOLK COUNTY, NEW YORK

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-01-19 · 1 citations

  paratextOpen access

  In this paper, we describe a hyperlocal ArcGIS- and sonificationbased COVID-19 web-mapping tool that seeks to ameliorate some of socio-technical problems associated with epidemiological mapping and the field’s frequent usage of visual and haptic data display. This socio-technical problems can be seen in current, wellknown and frequently cited epidemiological mapping tools, such as the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, which face functional and formal design challenges when compared to the hyper-phenomenal scope of the ongoing pandemic. As a review of our current project scope, we describe the stakes of the pandemic and pose questions related to the aforementioned design challenges that tools deploying data display may face. Taken as a whole, our project aims to offer a response to some of these design challenges by offering user choice and control, n-dimensional data display via sonification, and the integration so socio-political data into epidemiological layers to better represent Suffolk County’s lived experience with COVID-19.

  PublisherDOI

• Inclusive Listening

  openwork · 2023-05-14

  articleOpen access

  Our essay presents a critique of the limitations of Western Classical Music (WCM) in Aural Studies curricula, and the problems this poses for students from diverse musicking backgrounds. We propose a new teaching and learning framework, inspired by Black Feminist Pedagogy and aimed towards inclusivity, that devotes prolonged attention to multiple kinds of listening and analysis practices outside the WCM tradition. Our framework will be a live, open-access resource for teachers and self-directed students to understand various methods of listening and analysis. We prioritize the ability of this framework to communicate to students from a variety of disciplines and musicking backgrounds, including those who wish to develop listening skills relevant to electronic music practices, sound art, scored music, improvised music, and traditional musics. We believe that Aural Studies should be a teaching and learning space where a radical, prolonged breaking-down of institutional hierarchies can be enacted and propose that Aural Studies practices hold the potential to escape the notation-centeredness of WCM and the power dynamics implicit in that orientation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cynosuric Bodies

  2023-01-01

  otherSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Virtuosity and the commons

  2023-09-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A virtuoso performer carries mystique; there is an implication that their skills are magically endowed, which disavows their labour and the contributions of the communities from which they emerged. This mystique and community disenfranchisement support a toxic narrative of individual innate excellence, which in turn enables the term virtuosity to be weaponised in support of elite echelons and Western European art music hierarchies: systems that de-emphasise the music community as a whole to privilege singular figureheads. We reframe the term virtuoso as a signal of collective labour and redefine virtuosity as the result of shared support and contributions from communities, educational institutions, and families. Through ethnographic work and social mapping, we demonstrate the collective effort that makes a virtuoso possible. In so doing, we offer an alternative notion of virtuoso, shifting our attention to the contributions of a multitude of efforts to an individual’s success, and supporting a return of musicking to the commons.

  PublisherDOI

• Links between sonification and generative music

  Interdisciplinary Science Reviews · 2022-03-19 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  The authors investigate works by four composers who employed technology in the creation of music employing audification, sonification and algorithmic composition techniques. These compositions involve interdisciplinary collaborations either with scientific researchers, in the case of Annea Lockwood's Dusk and Carla Scaletti's hàgg, or artificial intelligence, in George Lewis's Voyager, and Bob Sturm's The Waters of Heanny. Each composer's choice of input data, custom-designed tools and personal compositional processes result in unique, expressive works that challenge the listener to expand their view of music and reality.

  PublisherDOI

• Editorial: Commercial music and the electronic music studio – influence, borrowings and language

  Organised Sound · 2022-04-01

  editorialOpen access

  An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nick Collins

  Durham University

  33 shared

• Scott Wilson

  30 shared

• Mara Helmuth

  University of Cincinnati Medical Center

  4 shared

• Petter Ericson

  Umeå University

  4 shared

• Tarik Barri

  Film Independent

  3 shared

• Alison Rootberg

  3 shared

• Joachim Goßmann

  Trossingen University of Music

  3 shared

• Kelly Snook

  University of Brighton

  3 shared