Personalized training. Professional rigor.

The Technology and Applied Composition (TAC) program relies on the guidance and real-world perspective of visiting professors working directly as professional technologists and film/game composers at the top of their field to shape its curriculum for maximum relevance. A number of high-profile visiting artists work with TAC students regularly, offering insights not only in technique, but the industry as a whole.

Gabriela Lena Frank.

Gabriela Lena Frank

Named one of The Washington Post's Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music in 2017, Frank was born in Berkeley, California to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, and explores her multicultural heritage through her compositions. Her compositions also reflect her virtuosity as a pianist—when not composing, she is a sought-after performer, specializing in contemporary repertoire.

Winner of a Latin GRAMMY and nominated for GRAMMY awards as both composer and pianist, Frank has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a USA Artist Fellowship. Regularly commissioned by luminaries such as cellist Yo Yo Ma, soprano Dawn Upshaw, the King’s Singers, the Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, she has also received orchestral commissions and performances from leading American orchestras including the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony. A member of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble (alongside SFCM Percussion faculty Haruka Fujii), in 2025, Frank was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and later that year, named Composer of the Year by Musical America.

Harry Gregson-Williams

Harry Gregson-Williams has composed music for video games, television and films including the Metal Gear series, Spy Game, Kingdom of Heaven, Phone Booth, Man on Fire, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, Déjà Vu, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Martian, Team America: World Police, Antz, The Tigger Movie, Chicken Run and its sequel, the Shrek franchise, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, Flushed Away, Arthur Christmas, Early Man, Catch-22, and Gladiator II. Gregson-Williams collaborated with several film directors such as Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Andrew Adamson, Ben Affleck, Joel Schumacher, Antoine Fuqua, Niki Caro, Nick Park, and Peter Lord.

Leslie Ann Jones

Leslie Ann Jones has been a recording and mixing engineer for over 50 years. Starting her career at ABC Recording Studios in Los Angeles in 1975, she moved to Northern California in 1978 to accept a staff position with David Rubinson and Fred Catero at the legendary Automatt Recording Studios. There she worked with such artists as Herbie Hancock, Bobby McFerrin, Holly Near, Angela Bofill, Frankie Beverly and Maze, Carlos Santana and Narada Michael Walden, and started her film score mixing career with Francis Ford Coppola's legendary Apocalypse Now. From 1987 to 1997 she was a staff engineer at Capitol Studios located in the historic Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood, where she recorded projects with Rosemary Clooney, Michael Feinstein, Michelle Shocked, BeBe & CeCe Winans, and Marcus Miller, as well as the scores for several feature films and television shows.

Returning to Northern California in February of 1997, Jones accepted a position as Director of Music Recording and Scoring for George Lucas' Skywalker Sound studio, where she continues her engineering career recording and mixing music for records, films, video games, television, and commercials. 

Jones has received an impressive seven GRAMMY for her work: 
2003: Best Chamber Music Album, Kronos Quartet's recording of Berg: Lyric Suite
2005: Best Jazz Vocal Album, Diane Reeves' Good Night and Good Luck
2011: Best Engineered Album, Classical for Quincy Porter: Complete Viola Works by Eliesha Nelson & John McLaughlin Williams 
2015: Best Engineered Album, Classical for Ask Your Mama. (Composer: Laura Karpman, featuring, among others, The San Francisco Ballet Orchestra and members of The Roots)
2019: Best Engineered Album, Classical for Sun Rings, by Kronos Quartet 
2021: Best Immersive Audio Album for Soundtrack of the American Soldier performed by The United States Army Field Band
2022: Best Engineered Album, Classical for Chanticleer Sings Christmas 

Michael Abels

2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning and Emmy- and GRAMMY-nominated composer Michael Abels is best known for his genre-defying scores for the Jordan Peele films Get Out, Us, and Nope. The score for Us won a World Soundtrack Award, the Jerry Goldsmith Award, a Critics Choice nomination, multiple critics awards, and was named "Score of the Decade" by The Wrap. Both Us and Nope were shortlisted for the Oscar for Best Original Score, and Nope was awarded Best Score for a Studio Film by the Society of Composers & Lyricists. In 2022, Abels' music was honored by the Vancouver International Film Festival, the Middleburg Film Festival, and the Museum of the Moving Image. Other recent projects include the films Bad Education, Nightbooks, Chevalier, Landscape with Invisible Hand and the docu-series Allen v. Farrow. 

Abels' creative output also includes many concert works, including the choral song cycle At War With Ourselves for the Kronos Quartet, the GRAMMY-nominated Isolation Variation for Hilary Hahn, and Omar, an opera co-composed with GRAMMY-winning recording artist Rhiannon Giddens. The New York Times named Omar one of the 10 Best Classical Performances of 2022, writing, "What Giddens and Abels created is an ideal of American sound, an inheritor of the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess but more honest to its subject matter, conjuring folk music, spirituals, Islamic prayer and more, woven together with a compelling true story that transcends documentary."

Abels other concert works have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Master Chorale and many others. Some of these pieces are available on the Cedille label, including Delights & Dances, Global Warming, and Winged Creatures. Commissions include Emerge for the National Symphony and Detroit Symphony, and the guitar concerto Borders for GRAMMY-nominated artist Mak Grgic. Abels is also the co-founder of the Composers Diversity Collective, an advocacy group to increase visibility of composers of color in film, gaming and streaming media.

Thomas Dolby

Dolby came to prominence in the 1980s, releasing hit singles like "She Blinded Me with Science" (1982) and "Hyperactive!" (1984) while also working as a producer and as a session musician. Though associated with the New Wave movement of the early 1980s, a form of pop music incorporating electronic instruments, Dolby;s work covers a wide range of musical styles and moods distinct from the high-energy pop sound of his few, better-known commercial successes.

In the 1990s, Dolby founded Beatnik, a Silicon Valley software company which developed the polyphonic ringtone software and created the Nokia tune. Its technology was used in more than half a billion cell phones. He was also the music director for TED Conferences. In July 1998, Dolby received a "Lifetime Achievement in Internet Music" award from Yahoo! Internet Life. In 2012 he performed at Moogfest and was the recipient of The Moog Innovation Award, which celebrates "pioneering artists whose genre-defying work exemplifies the bold, innovative spirit of Bob Moog." In February 2018, Dolby was awarded the Roland Lifetime Achievement Award. Dolby has received four GRAMMY nominations, two each in 1984 and 1988.

Bear McCreary

Bear McCreary (Credit: Ted Sun)

McCreary has proven himself one of the most versatile and in-demand composers in the industry. Forbes declared, "As a composer, his genre track record is one of the most impressive in modern day Hollywood." His myriad of credits includes the hit series Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead, and Outlander; the films Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Happy Death Day, and 10 Cloverfield Lane; and Sony PlayStation's iconic God of War video-game series. Currently, McCreary is scoring The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Amazon Studios' record-shattering series.

McCreary won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Main Title Theme for Da Vinci's Demons and Emmy nominations a composition that is a carefully constructed palindrome (sounding the same forwards and backwards). His score for the epic Apple TV+ series Foundation was orchestrated around custom computer software, inspired by the show’s mathematical premise. McCreary also received Emmy nominations for Outlander, the pirate drama Black Sails from executive producer Michael Bay; and Fox's Human Target. His music for Battlestar Galactica was lauded by Variety as "innovative" and "like no other" by NPR, and earned him a coveted spot on io9.com’s "Ten Best Science Fiction Composers of All Time" list. He earned the prestigious BAFTA and DICE awards, as well as a GRAMMY nomination for his scores to Sony PlayStation's 2018 smash hit God of War and its massive sequel God of War: Ragnarök.

McCreary has conducted performances of his music throughout North America and Europe and composed concert commissions for the Calder Quartet and Getty Center, the Hagen Philharmonic and Ballet in Germany, the Television Academy, the Seattle Symphony, and the Golden State Pops Orchestra. His music has been performed on multiple occasions at the Hollywood Bowl including in 2014 when Maestro Gustavo Dudamel masterfully conducted a suite of McCreary’s music with the L.A. Philharmonic and L.A. Master Chorale. 

Javad Butah

Butah's unique and innovative perspective on music can be traced to his Romani roots, his studies under various tabla masters, as well as his formal conservatory education. Javad has toured for over 20 years, performing as a solo artist as well as accompanying world-renowned musicians in distinguished venues domestically as well as abroad. 

As an educator, Butah has built successful music programs based on not only teaching the practical applications of music production using the latest technology, but also integrating music theory, which he believes broadens their knowledge of the creative process. Javad uses Ableton Live to create a blend of music that borrows from his love of both classical world music as well as contemporary sounds and techniques. As a brand manager for Ableton, Javad tours the United States giving lectures and demonstrations.

Tim Davies

Tim Davies is one of the busiest conductors and orchestrators in Hollywood. His recent film and TV credits include Minions, Ant­ Man, Empire, The Peanuts Movie, Frozen, The Book of Life, and Edge of Tomorrow. He has conducted and orchestrated numerous video game scores, such as the God of War and Infamous series, The Last of Us, and both Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Knight. 

Arranging highlights for Davies include arranging and playing drums for the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. for the 20th-anniversary concert of NAS' Illmatic as well as arranging Kendrick Lamar's performance of To Pimp a Butterfly at the storied venue. Davies has arranged for albums by chart­-topping artists Amy Winehouse, Akon, Miguel, and Cee Lo Green, and his own group, the 18-­piece Tim Davies Big Band, for which he writes and plays drums, received a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Composition in 2010. Recently Davies has been in demand as a composer, working with two­-time Oscar-winner Gustavo Santaolalla on the score to the Fox animated film The Book of Life. This was also the beginning of a partnership with producer/director Guillermo del Toro, which led to writing additional music for Crimson Peak and now scoring his new animated TV show, Trollhunters, produced by Dreamworks Animation for Netflix.

Catherine Joy

With a passion for music and collaboration, Catherine Joy is a composer for film, media and live performance. Early in her career she won Best Documentary Score at the Garden State Film Festival for the feature documentary Gold Balls. Her narrative feature, Potato Dreams Of America, had its world premiere at SXSW 2021. She also scored the documentary Prognosis: Notes on Living about the final journey of Oscar-winning social justice filmmaker Debra Chasnoff.

In 2022, Joy scored a number of romantic comedies for Reel One Entertainment including Love Gala, Luckless in Love and Romantic Rewrite and the thriller Twisted Sister for Sunshine Films. Her latest feature, the Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellowship recipient Home Is A Hotel, premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival, winning both the Jury and Audience award, and the score resulted in Joy winning the SCL David Raksin Emerging Talent award. 

Joy has scored a number of series, starting with Capitol Hill, which began on YouTube and then was televised throughout Canada and Europe. She also scored the dramedies Abby & Tabby Alone In The Desert and No Matter What. In 2020 Joy worked on the History channel miniseries WASHINGTON and led the her own Joy Music House team in score producing Homecoming Season 2 (Amazon Studios). In 2022 Joy wrote additional music on Sony's Going Home and is currently working on the second season.

Joy was part of the music team on notable recent projects. She was the Lead Orchestrator on the Crunchyroll original anime series Onyx Equinox and High Guardian Spice, released in 2020 and 2021, respectively. She score-supervised and orchestrated on the Sundance award-winning feature Minari and the Emmy-nominated scores RBG and Love, Gilda. She also score supervised HBO's Emmy-winning documentary At The Heart of Gold and feature Son of The South, executive-produced by Spike Lee and directed by his long-time editor Barry Alexander Brown. 

Joy had two chamber concert works premiere in 2019, Just Breathe with the Helix Collective and We are Machine with Kroma Quartet as part of the LA Chamber House series. In 2021, she released her string quartet EP Her Evensong.

Roger Linn

Roger Linn is a designer of electronic music products, best known for his invention of the LM-1 Drum Computer, the first programmable, sampled-sound drum machine in 1979. Manufactured by his company Linn Electronics, the LM-1 and its successors the LinnDrum and Linn9000 provided the drums for countless hit records during the 1980s by artists including Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Peter Gabriel, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Devo and Bruce Hornsby, and are considered a major influence on the music of the era.

In 1988, he designed the innovative MPC60 MIDI Production Center for the Japanese Akai Company. Combining a sampling drum machine with a real-time MIDI sequencer, this product gradually became the industry standard in the production of hip-hop, dance and related music styles throughout the 1990s, and has been credited as a significant influence in the evolution of hip-hop music. This was followed in 1994 with the enhanced MPC3000 and others. In addition to these designs for Akai, he also helped design products for a variety of companies during the 1990s, including the Japanese Roland company.

In 2002, he returned to manufacturing his own products—as well as his love of the guitar—with the release of a groundbreaking guitar effects product called AdrenaLinn. Used on hit recordings by artists such as John Mayer, Green Day and Red Hot Chili Peppers, AdrenaLinn transforms a guitarist's tone by using variety of innovative rhythmic filtering methods, all in sync to an internal drumbeat. This was followed in 2003 by the enhanced AdrenaLinn II, the M-Audio Black Box (containing many AdrenaLinn features) in 2005, and the AdrenaLinn III in 2007. In 2011 he released the Tempest Analog Drum Machine, designed in collaboration with Dave Smith Instruments. In 2014 he released the LinnStrument, an expressive MIDI performance controller.

Apart from his music product career, Roger is a guitarist and songwriter, having co-written hits for Eric Clapton ("Promises," 1979) and Mary Chapin Carpenter ("Quittin' Time," 1989), and having served as touring guitarist and recording engineer with pianist/songwriter Leon Russell in 1976 at age 21. In February 2011, the Recording Academy presented him with the Technical Grammy Merit Award.

Wilbert Roget II

Wilbert Roget II is a veteran composer in the video game industry. He joined LucasArts as a staff composer in 2008, where he scored several games in the Star Wars universe, including Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Wars: First Assault. He later became a freelance writer, scoring Call of Duty: WWII, Mortal Kombat 11, Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, Dead Island 2, Anew: The Distant Light and other indie and AAA titles. His scores have earned him several awards and nominations from the Game Audio Network Guild, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (D.I.C.E. Awards), and others. 

Inspired at an early age by classic Japanese game soundtracks, Roget specializes in writing music that employs memorable themes, developed throughout the score in a traditional fashion. He balances modern production with classic construction, creating fresh and contemporary soundscapes as well as nuanced orchestrations. Wilbert studied music at Yale University, is originally from Philadelphia, PA and currently resides in Seattle, WA. He is an avid multi-instrumentalist, performing solo flute, keyboards, accordion and guitar on many of his scores.

Jonathan Snipes

Jonathan Snipes is a composer and sound designer for film and theater living in Los Angeles. Theater credits include The White Album (Lars Jan, Early Morning Opera), A Jordan Downs Illumination (Cornerstone Theater Company), Marshmallow Sea and Moon (szalt dance company), Good People and Wait Until Dark (Geffen Playhouse), Nocturne (Black Dahlia Theatre) and Meditations on Virginity (National Theater in Warsaw, Poland). Film credits include Room 237 (IFC), Starry Eyes (Dark Sky), Mope (Sundance 2019), and The El Duce Tapes (Hot Docs 2019). He is a member of the rap group "clipping," currently signed to Sub Pop Records.

Fred Frith

Multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser Fred Frith has been making noise of one kind or another for more than 50 years, starting with the rock collective Henry Cow, which he co-founded with Tim Hodgkinson in 1968. Fred is best known as a pioneering electric guitarist and improviser, song-writer, and composer for film, dance and theater. His compositions have been performed by ensembles ranging from Eclipse Quartet and the Bang on a Can All Stars to Concerto Köln and Galax Quartet, from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra to the ROVA and Arte Sax Quartets, from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Ground Zero to the Glasgow Improvisers’ Orchestra.

Film music credits include the acclaimed documentaries Rivers and Tides, Leaning into the Wind, and Tracing Light, directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer; The Tango Lesson, Yes and The Party by Sally Potter; Middle of the Moment by Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel; as well as Penzel's Zen for Nothing, Peter Mettler's Gods, Gambling and LSD, and the award-winning (and Oscar-nominated) Last Day of Freedom by Nomi Talisman and Dee Hibbert-Jones.

Theater credits include François Chat’s Setaccio and François-Michel Pesenti’s Théâtre du Point Aveugle in Marseille, where he spent six months in 1990 working with “jeunes rockers en chômage des quartiers défavorisés” on the opera Helter Skelter.

The recipient of Italy’s Demetrio Stratos Prize for his life’s work in experimental music and an honorary doctorate from the University of Huddersfield in his home county of Yorkshire, Fred taught for twenty years at the legendary epicenter of American experimental music, Mills College in Oakland, California; as well as co-directing (with Alfred Zimmerlin) the improvisation master’s program at the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland. He is the subject of Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel's much loved Step Across the Border, cited by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the 20th century's hundred most influential films. 

Barry Threw

Barry Threw cultivates forward-looking, impactful, boundary-blurring projects integrating culture and technology. He drifts fluidly between roles, collaborating as an executive, curator, technologist, designer, community organizer, cultural producer, and strategist.

Threw has over a decade of experience producing projects integrating art, technology, and culture: as Software Director with Keith McMillen Instruments, developing advanced technology to bridge traditional string instruments with computers; as Technical Director with Recombinant Media Labs, presenting surround cinema at installations and festivals around the world; on the Board of Directors for the BEAM Foundation, seeking to spark a Western new classical music movement based on the technologies and aesthetics of the 21st century; and as Director of Software with Obscura Digital, a San Francisco-based creative technology studio specializing in the design and execution of immersive and interactive experiences worldwide, acquired in 2017 by the Madison Square Garden Company.

He is currently the Executive Director of Gray Area—a San Francisco non-profit institution focused on creative action for social transformation through public events, incubation, and education. He is also a founding partner at Fabricatorz—a distributed technology studio for cultural projects with nodes in Hong Kong, St. Louis, and Berlin. He advises institutions, corporations, and organizations globally.

He organizes the #NEWPALMYRA project, an online community platform focused on the virtual reconstruction and creative reuse of cultural heritage. He developed and runs the Bassel Khartabil Fellowship, which supports outstanding people under adverse conditions developing free culture in their communities.

Austin Wintory

Austin Wintory

Austin Wintory is an American composer who has composed scores for films and video games. He is particularly known for composing the scores to the acclaimed video game titles flOw and Journey, the latter of which was nominated for a GRAMMY Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media (the first-ever for a video game)

Austin has also scored nearly 50 feature films, and his first major film score, for the Sundance Film Festival-winning film Captain Abu Raed, was shortlisted for the 2009 Academy Awards for Best Original Score by the LA Times. His next major film, Grace, was also a hit at the Sundance Film Festival. Austin's score (which featured a wild array of custom-recorded sounds such as babies crying and horse flies, in addition to a large ensemble of clarinets at London's famed Abbey Road Studios), was also highly lauded, earning a notorious Fangoria Chainsaw Award nomination and being cited by Visions in Sound as among the Top 10 Scores for 2010. His most recent films are writer/director Adam Alleca's Standoff, starring Thomas Jane and Laurence Fishburne, and Amin Matalqa's The Rendezvous, starring Stana Katic.