Peter Otto

Peter Otto is an expert in the language and aesthetics of advanced media, and also accomplished in advanced hardware/software design and engineering, including instrumentation and facilities design, systems and networking applications, and a wide array of media technology research and development. Classically trained in musical performance and composition, he completed his graduate work at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 1984, and continued there on faculty for several years. His vita includes long associations with seminal figures Morton Subotnick and Luciano Berio, as well as studies and collaborations with Pulitzer Prize winners Mel Powell and Roger Reynolds. He held appointments at UCSD as Technology Director on the Faculty of Music and as Director of Research & Development in the Sonic Arts R&D group at UCSD's CalIT2 Qualcomm Institute, which he established in 2009. As an educator he is a founding faculty member and advisor to UCSD Music's highly regarded Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major (ICAM), a program which has produced top performers in the nation's most advanced digital media industries and leading universities. As hardware designer he invented the first digital audio workstation control surface (Waveframe's Contact MIDI Panel), designed the hardware-based spatial audio system TRAILS, and more recently designed audio systems for leading academic laboratories (StarCave, HiperWall and other systems). Audio and music facility credits include CalIT2's Spatial Audio Lab (Spatlab) and collaborative designs for CalIT2's Black Box and Digital Cinema Theatres, and new systems and studios at UCSD Music's new Prebys Music Center (Experimental Theatre and other systems). Other design work includes advanced research projects in high-definition multi-channel audio streaming and production systems, most notably for CineGrid, a networked ultra-high-definition digital cinema R&D consortium. His research has focused on auditory imaging and multidimensionality for the past ten years. Sponsors and collaborators include SkySound (LucasArts), Qualcomm, Inc., Cisco, Meyer Sound Labs, National Institutes of Health, HMC Architects, CineGrid, Walt Disney Productions, NTT, Biamp, Google, Comhear, Kyocera, NASA, NSF, Cubic, Harman, DTS, Dysonics, IGT and others. In software design, Otto has written software for diverse applications in multi-channel and spatial audio, including binaural and multi-channel sound design environments and utilities, and a variety of spatial audio imaging packages. An entrepreneur, he has founded two software companies and consulted for top tier firms in the private sector. His performance design work has been heard in major American, European and Asian venues such as Carnegie Hall, Juilliard, Los Angeles Philharmonic, SIGGRAPH, Theatre Olympics (Japan), The Holland Festival, Foundation Maecht (Fr.), Santa Cecilia (Italy), Barbican and Royal Albert Halls (London), Ars Electronica (Austria), and many others. Otto is currently VP Innovation for Dysonics, Inc. of San Francisco.