You can find Emily Howell's music all over the internet, but a search for the person comes up empty. She plays no concerts, attends no events, has no email address, and not a single photo comes up under a google search. Join Music is Music host Ria Misra as she talks with composer David Cope about who Emily Howell is--and what Emily Howell means for the future of music.

Ben Lukas Boysen and Sebastian Plano--the composers who wrote the music for the videogame, Everything--join host Ria Misra for a conversation about games, music, and how to build a musical world for a videogame where you can, literally, play the universe.

At times, listening to Manu Delago play music, you might think you hear him play a steel drum, a harp, or a tabla--and yet all of those sounds are actually coming from one instrument: the hang drum. Delago brings his hang into our New York studio for a chat with host, Ria Misra.

Music is Music host Ria Misra visits composer and pianist Vijay Iyer at his home in Harlem to talk about the secret lives of instruments, the everyday art of improvisation, and also just to hear some really beautiful music.

International Space Orchestra founder Nelly Ben Hayoun and NASA Ames Flight Director (and saxophonist) Rusty Hunt are here for part 2 of our music in space series. Join us as we meet a band where you can find astronauts, NASA flight directors, and all kinds of space scientists all clustered around the same piece of music.

Composer Arthur Jeffes joins us to tell us about working with space scientists to transform black holes and exoplanets into music.

Christopher Tignor is a composer, violinist, and software engineer. His emotionally charged scores and unique focus on live, performance-based electro-acoustic practice has won acclaim within both the classical and experimental communities.

From a young age, Sam Shepherd has rejected the idea of neat, tidy musical categories. He studied classical piano growing up, but felt confined by what he calls the "dots on a page." It wasn't until he heard a performer really making a classical piece his own, breaking out of strictly classical feel, that he was hooked. Now, Shepherd writes music under the alias "Floating Points." Influences of classical, jazz, electronica, pop, and world music all blend to create a sound that doesn't fit...

Melody Parker loves to dance. When she wrote the music for her album "Archipelago," she didn't start with a catchy tune, or harmonies, or rhythm. She started with movement. On this episode of Music is Music, Melody Parker tells us all about her love of dance and movement. And we'll hear about the acoustic worlds she creates, both in her music and elsewhere. Have a listen, and hear the music that Parker describes as "chamber pop," chamber music with a catchy, pop feel. To find out more about...

The path to becoming a Washington D.C. advisor on climate science and global warming is easy. First study piano and double bass. Then, get a degree in composition. Next thing you know, you're a climate scientist. At least, this is how it happened for Taylor Jordan. Jordan records under the name The Greatest Hoax, a name he borrowed from Senator James Inhofe's (R-OK) 2012 book. The book is a shot across the bow of mainstream science and claims of global warming. So it's fair to say Jordan, a...

Composer Keith Kenniff has a knack for writing music that inspires. Keith Kenniff has many aliases. There's his electronic project, Helios. Mint Juliep is the band he and his wife formed -- that's a more drums with distorted guitars affair. Then there's Goldmund, where he plays delicate, sparse piano and adds subtle sound flourishes. None of these bands or monikers, however, hold a candle to the audiences Kenniff reaches in his other bands... or I should say brands. Facebook, Apple, Google,...

Cellist Shannon Hayden installed the solar panels that power the recording studio that's housed in the farm that she built with her bare hands (with the help of her dad). Oh, and she also imitates the guitar sounds of noise-punk band Melt Banana with her cello... aaaaand she was once set on fire for being a better cellist than a boy. Yup. On her latest album, You See the World, Shannon channels her love of noise, traditional classical and textured drones into songs full of tension and...

Drivers in Los Angeles begin to feel their jaws tighten at the mere mention of traffic. One lifelong resident, however, used that hum of urban din to make music. Taking a cue from John Cage, composer and self-taught saxophonist Brian Allen Simon heard melody in everyday noise. He records under the name Anenon. His latest release is Petrol, which is where you'll find the song: Machines. From car horns to the underground parking garage at Walt Disney Concert Hall, this album takes you places...

Most of us don't go around trying to imagine what sci-fi painter Moebius (aka Jean Giraud), a nudibranch (aka sea slug), and the film: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (aka the beginning of Hayao Miyazaki's feature animation dominance) might sound like as music. It's a good thing Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith isn't most of us. She decoded those visual references and uses them as the foundation for her newest album, EARS. The whole record lives in a bubble, dripping with enough dense greenery to...

American composer Gabriel Kahane originally wrote The Fiction Issue for a 2012 Carnegie Hall commission. He reached out to his pals in the string quartet, Brooklyn Rider, and My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden to collaborate. All parties got back together to record The Fiction Issue in 2015, and it's the title track on the Kahane/Brooklyn Rider co-release. Worden and Kahane trade off singing duties on the six-parts that make up The Fiction Issue. What we know for sure is that coffee and...

To those who knew him, especially his piano students, Emilio del Rosario will always be Mr. D. He had a knack for helping budding, young pianists grow into confident, concert pianist. Case in point: 21-year-old Conrad Tao. Tao was introduced to Mr. D at age five and only studied with him until he was nine. But if you think about those specific years in a young person's life, that's when you learn your habits. That's where your convictions take root. That's when the encouragement of teachers...

Nate Kinsella records under the name Birthmark. On this installment of Music is Music, he takes us down the circuitous route that led him to his latest record, How You Look When You're Falling Down. Fun fact: all songs on this record were built around spur-of-the-moment drum beats (whoo-hoo!). This is his most upbeat batch of songs to date... and that's on purpose. Find out how moving to New York and dancing with abandon contributed to the sound and feel of the record. Then listen to "Sounds...

Ozere is a group of musicians that Canadian violinist Jessica Deutsch put together back in 2012. It's also the culmination of Deutsch's world travels. And if you're wondering, the band's name (pronounced: oh-ZER-uh) is Yiddish for "lake," but that's a whole other story. Deutsch grew up playing classical violin. But even before her instrument ever came into the picture, she was blessed with perfect pitch -- her mother tells the story of toddler Jessica climbing up the family piano to always...

Take a close listen to Masayoshi Fujita's latest record, Apologues, and you might hear the rattle of plastic-beaded necklaces or the muted tones of a vibraphone smothered under a tea towel. Fujita has been toying with the prepared vibraphone since he moved to Berlin nearly a decade ago, and he has a good handle on how to bring out new and nuanced sounds. Although he's had a steady stream of collaborations with electronic improvisers like Jan Jelinek and a couple vibes-through-processor discs...

Alex Temple's new composition Behind the Wallpaper was specifically written with singer/songwriter Julia Holter and the Spektral Quartet. The piece combines Spektral Quartet's brand of accessibility and playfulness with the neo-renaissance vocal stylings Holter likes to hint at in her own work. Spektral Quartet is one of the gems of the Chicago music scene. The group is just as comfortable performing in a concert hall as it is at a bar. Case in point: this installment of Music is Music, where...

You may have heard of the band Wilco. Maybe fewer of you have heard of the band's drummer, Glenn Kotche. And probably fewer still, know that Kotche is a classically trained percussionist and composer. In this installment of Music is Music, we're taking a trip into Kotche's world through a piece called Wild Sound. The members in Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion approached Kotche back in 2008 to see if he'd be interested in collaboration. The vibe was there from the beginning, but concert...

Roberto Lange grew up in South Florida, or as he calls it, "the capital of Latin America." It's a landing place for so many Spanish-speaking cultures -- think Columbia, Trinidad, Ecuador, and of course Cuba. Lange ingested the flavors of these cultures, then mixed them with the inescapable sounds of Miami bass music. The result is a project he calls Helado Negro. Until recently concocting Helado Negro songs was largely the job of Lange programing beats, playing keyboards and crooning (in...

Nils Frahm's hands began gracing a keyboard at an early age. He learned the classics as a kid. Everything changed when he discovered Keith Jarrett. It took a while, but Frahm realized he couldn't get through life being a Jarrett clone, so he eventually moved on... and out. Electronic music and Berlin's club scene floated into the picture before Frahm turned back to his roots and the piano. By this time, however, Frahm was busy blending a stew all his own. A blend of piano, electric keyboards...