The 2026 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest is Open.
Otto Iivari’s composition Dynamo won third place in the 2025 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest. Iivari is a Finnish electroacoustic composer and a doctoral candidate at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. His artistic practice centers on acousmatic and electroacoustic music, composed specifically for multichannel configurations and ambisonic systems. His work explores the expressive potential of organic sound materials, with a particular emphasis on spatialization and the dynamic movement of sound. A central theme in his creative research is the relationship between expressive human movement and the perceived motion of sound; he examines their interplay as a source of artistic expression.
Iivari has won awards in several international competitions in the field of electroacoustic music, including the Student 3D Audio Competition (Europe), the International Sonosfera Ambisonic Competition, the CIME competition organized by the International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music, and the Prix Russolo. His compositions have been presented in concerts and festivals worldwide. He is currently pursuing artistic research under the supervision of Nikos Stavropoulos and Helena Tulve.
Here’s Iivari’s program text for Dynamo:
When I think of the sound materials I have gathered for this piece, I imagine a large wheel with a crank handle. As the wheel begins to spin, it offers varying levels of resistance and produces an endless stream of iterating, dystonic sound objects, resembling an imaginary barrel organ generating abstract sounds. The spinning also produces energy as an ongoing process, similar to a dynamo, an invention developed over a long period by multiple creators, in a way that parallels the practice of acousmatic music composition. This piece is handmade, composed over the course of a year (2024–2025) in a collage style rooted in musique concrète.
It functions as a homage to several electroacoustic concepts and methods of sound production and spatialization, including feedback synthesis, pulsar synthesis by Curtis Roads, spatial distortion by Thorvald Bugge Helle, Ambisonic granular synthesis developed at IEM Graz, and the concept of fabrication synthesis by Panayiotis Kokoras, which in this piece is realized through the use of various glass and metallic objects to create energy articulations captured with mono, stereo, surround, and ambisonic microphone techniques.
The work also incorporates an AI-generated voice that attempts to mimic the composer’s compound sound patterns, alongside the sound of a self-made DIYPVC overtone flute included in the final composition. Space is explored through the dichotomy of Nikos Stavropoulos’s aural micro-space and a choreography-inspired “dance” of singular sound objects, a concept closely related to my own artistic research. Ultimately, this piece represents a sentence, or perhaps a single word or sound, within the global discourse of electroacoustic music that spans past, present, and future.
The 2025 Musicworks EMC Contest received 127 composition entries from 17 countries. Read the media release with the full list of 2025 winners.
Learn more about Otto Iivari and his work here.
Audio: Dynamo (2025) by Otto Iivari
Photo by Anton Hansen
