BIOGRAPHY

Timothy Gmeiner is a San Diego, California-based spatial and audiovisual hip-hop artist, educator and researcher. As a practicing artist, he has toured internationally under the name "Ill Poetic" and garnered public acclaim for his releases from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and others. He has collaborated with or had production featured under acts such acts as King Britt, Chris Orrick, Illogic, Slum Village, Steph Richards and Blitz Bazawule. Through his company SoundRzn Design, he has provided audio and visual services for artists, universities and companies of various industries including the San Diego Symphony, Mello Music Group, producer RJD2, OWN, and HBO.

As a business owner, he has launched and co-operated an independent record label, Definition Music, for two decades. Releases from this label have won numerous festival awards, licensed to television and film, led to international tours and garnered millions of streams and downloads.

As a community-driven educator, he has partnered with universities, local organizations, community centers and music festivals throughout the US and Mexico to offer workshops on music production and artist entrepreneurship. He is currently a professor of music production and entrepreneurship at San Diego City College and instructor of Hip-Hop at UC-San Diego.

He has worked as the Assistant Director at the Qualcomm Institute's Audio Spatialization Lab and is currently enrolled as a UC-San Diego Computer Music PhD program candidate where he focuses on spatial and audiovisual relationships in virtual and physical spaces, Specifically, his research threads the technical fields of sinusoidal modeling and object-oriented sound spatialization with cognitive multisensory response systems and emotional resonance in music-centered immersive environments, exploring how these fields might sonically and culturally intersect hip-hop production and performance with spatialization and live audiovisual practice. Of his most recent works, “Pigments of Imagination”, is an interactive virtual reality composition that was presented at UC-San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute and won an award for best demo presentation at the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST) 2023.

Learn more about the collective I work with HERE.

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