About

Daniel Dehaan is a music and sound designer, educator, and music technologist whose work explores new relationships between music, emerging media, and interactive systems. His creative and research practice spans electronic and interactive music, immersive and spatial audio, sound design, creative software development, generative systems, and emerging technologies.

Daniel is a tenured Associate Professor of Music Technology at Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches music technology, digital composition, interactive audio, and creative technology. His undergraduate and graduate labs integrate AI-assisted coding and emerging AI music-creation tools alongside critical discussion of authorship, copyright, ownership, and responsible creative use. He has developed curriculum spanning laptop performance, synthesis, sound design, interactive media, and music technology, and has led significant curricular and facilities initiatives within the School of Audio and Music. His work includes establishing the laptop as an official instrument, developing new music technology courses and capstone experiences, and designing and building music production facilities.

His creative and research practice is grounded in a longstanding interest in the ways emerging technologies can expand musical expression and creative practice. His doctoral research at Northwestern University, Compositional Possibilities of New Interactive and Immersive Digital Formats, explored new approaches to musical creation through interactive and immersive technologies. This work has continued through projects involving spatial audio, interactive music systems, virtual reality, generative music, custom software, and digital instruments.

Daniel also creates and extends technologies when existing tools cannot support a creative or educational idea. That practice has run from Max/MSP patches and Max for Live devices to interactive and immersive systems in Unity, Wwise, and FMOD, to custom scripts, DAW extensions, and standalone software, and now to coding agents as an implementation medium for domain-specific design. He is the founder of Simple Sound Tools and the creator and product lead of StemShare, a browser-based learning environment for music technology that grew out of his teaching and brings together interactive lessons with playable audio, multitrack peer critique, and specification grading; and of Atlas, a local-first file-provenance tool. On these projects he defines the problem, the product goals, and the behavior, evaluates and tests what is built in real studios and classrooms, and directs iterative development.

Daniel's professional creative practice spans film, games, virtual reality, immersive installations, interactive media, and experiential design. His work has included sound and music for Google, T-Mobile, Jellyvision, WNDR Museum, and the VR game The Last Clockwinder, among other projects. Across these contexts, he combines music, sound design, technology, and systems-based approaches to create interactive and responsive sonic experiences.

Across teaching and creative work, Daniel is interested in what particular technologies do idiomatically: what a tool makes easy or hard, and how those affordances shape creative decisions. Productive limitations can inspire; a technological limitation should not decide an idea’s fate. When it would, he builds, extends, or connects tools until it doesn’t. AI is the newest extension of that longstanding practice of using emerging technology to expand what can be made, and he uses it the way he uses any tool: with human creative agency, domain expertise, and evaluation kept in charge.

Daniel holds a Doctor of Music in Composition and Music Technology from Northwestern University.