Research &
Teaching

Biography

Panagiotis Peter Valsamis holds an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College (1999), where he received a Hellman Scholarship to study percussion with William Winant, and studied composition and performance with Pauline Oliveros, Wadada Leo Smith, Alvin Curran, David Behrman, Christian Wolff, and Butch Morris. He holds a BFA in Fine Arts (Integrative Music Studies) from Concordia University, Montréal (1998).

His thesis, "Machines Drumming," was published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (Vol. 7, No. 1, 2001, SAGE Publications). The article examines groove, drum machines, and the phenomenology of rhythm — proposing three modes of drumming (physical, synthetic, fixed) and their relationship to time, feel, and human perception of pulse.

He currently teaches Music for Film and Games and Orchestration at Oregon State University, drawing on his experience as an in-house composer and lead audio designer for interactive media.

He studied Balinese gamelan with I Wayan Suweca at the Université de Montréal, and began his studies at McGill University in anthropology before later leaving to pursue music full-time.