Christi Denton - Composer and Sound Artist

Project Spotlight: The LAMOSO (LAsar/MOtion/SOund) is an interactive musical interface that turns movement through light into sound. Using an array of lasers or lights paired with modified photogates, the LAMOSO detects when beams are interrupted and translates those gestures into MIDI data via a Teensy microcontroller. That data is then shaped into sound within Max, allowing performers (e.g., dancers) to generate and manipulate music simply by moving through space. Since its first performance in 2011 at Ten Tiny Dances, the LAMOSO has appeared in dance works, festivals (e.g., the Time Based Art Festival in Portland Oregon), and was a 2012 contestant in the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition in Atlanta Georgia.

Project Spotlight: earthworm is the long-running collaborative practice of Christi Denton and Margaret Fiedler McGinnis, working at the intersection of sound, sculpture, performance, and responsive systems. Their projects treat sound as a physical and ecological force, shaped by bodies, materials, environments, and non-human actors. Drawing equally from experimental music, installation art, and engineering, earthworm creates works in which listening becomes an embodied, spatial, and often participatory act.

Project Spotlight: ethanolorchestra is an orchestra and sound installation composed of alcohol sensors. Audience members breathe into breathalyzers, and the resulting blood-alcohol readings directly modify a shared soundscape. The work is playable by people who are drinking—or not—transforming intoxication, sobriety, and social presence into compositional parameters. Ethanolorchestra reframes collective music-making as a biochemical feedback system, where physiology and choice shape the evolving sonic environment.

Project Spotlight: SAMPLE (Sonic Arts and Music Production Laptop Ensemble) is a distributed performance ensemble that explores networked collaboration, live electronics, and collective authorship. In works such as Social Distance (2020), ensemble members generate and manipulate personal field recordings in real time using custom Max/MSP instruments linked via Open Sound Control. Physical separation becomes structural rather than limiting: individual, isolated sound worlds are woven into a continuously shifting shared composition. SAMPLE is part of Portland State University's Sonic Arts department and Christi taught these classes/lead this ensemble from 2019 to 2022.

Project Spotlight: marcel is a Sarracenia plant turned musical instrument. Sensors embedded in soil and stem measure humidity, temperature, moisture, and movement, while contact, hydrophone, and geophone microphones amplify the plant's internal and environmental activity. These data streams are translated into sound in real time, allowing marcel to respond to touch, insects, water, and atmospheric change. The work treats the plant not as a controller but as a co-performer, extending its living ecosystem into the sonic domain.

Project Spotlight: Haricot Project, a collaboration with filmmaker Pam Minty, is a multimedia installation inspired by Edmond Sechan's 1962 short film Le Haricot, which tells the story of an elderly woman's quiet devotion to a discarded bean plant. The work expands this narrative into an immersive environment combining multi-screen film, multichannel sound, and a living garden. By integrating real plant growth with moving image and sound, Haricot Project explores care, persistence, and human–plant relationships as evolving, shared systems shaped over time.

Project Spotlight: Electrogals is a Portland-based concert series and community platform dedicated to electronic and experimental music created by women. Through curated live events and collaborative performances, Electrogals amplifies female artists working across synthesis, sound art, and experimental composition. Founded to counter the underrepresentation of women in electronic music, the project foregrounds visibility, connection, and community-building within a historically male-dominated field.