Ko Muramatsu

Ko Muramatsu is a Japanese composer based in New York. His music has appeared in a wide range of contexts and media.

His acoustic compositions have been performed by ensembles such as MIVOS Quartet and Kompass Ensemble. His works have been performed by outstanding musicians, including Aki Kitajima, Yuki Yoshimi, and Chihiro Asano. He was commissioned by the 89th Yomiuri Shinjin Ensōkai (Concert for Emerging Musicians, sponsored by Yomiuri Newspaper). His output ranges from solo pieces to orchestral music. Selected by Matthias Pintscher, he participated in the Music Composition Workshop at the Suntory Hall Summer Festival in 2021. Most recently, his sinfonietta work Virtuality II was premiered by the Eastman Graduate Students’ Sinfonietta.

He is highly active in the field of electroacoustic music. He was commissioned by OSSIA New Music to compose Distant, which integrates acoustic instruments with audiovisual live electronics. Virtuality I for string quartet and fixed media was premiered by MIVOS Quartet at the VIPA Festival. His electronic practice delves into programming environments such as Max, Pure Data, and Python, through which he integrates technology into his compositional process.

His interests extend to theatrical and interdisciplinary work. He collaborated with a drama group, Mitsuashi-no Saru, and composed music for Botandōro, a Japanese classical horror storytelling performance with live instrumentalists, sponsored by Arts Council Tokyo. He is involved in interdisciplinary improvisation performance, where he collaborates with live instrumentalists and visual artists. In InDialog, he used his self-modeled AI program to interact with the live improvising performers.

As a composer, his music is often expressed as detailed, sensuous, and exploratory. His composition explores new possibilities for musical interpretation, often in relation to electronics and modern technology. As an emerging composer who has grown up in the rapidly evolving digital culture, he views technology as inseparable from modern artistic expression. Through electronic media, his music creates vivid sonic moments while engaging with cultural memory and personal reminiscence. His dissertation research focuses on "AI and its creative use in music composition," where he addresses the technical advantage of AI and also its associated aesthetic questions. As part of this research, he developed a real-time polyphonic piano pitch detection system.

He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Eastman School of Music in Composition, studying with Mikel Kuehn, Elizabeth Ogonek, Daniel Pesca, and Matt Barber. He holds an M.M. with an academic honor from New England Conservatory, where he studied composition with Stratis Minakakis and completed a theory minor with Katarina Miljkovic. He earned a B.A. in Composition from Nihon University College of Art, studying with Hiroyuki Itoh and Naoko Hishinuma, and received several academic honors and prizes, including a merit-based scholarship.

At Eastman School of Music, he served as a graduate teaching assistant for EMuSE (Electroacoustic Music Studios @ Eastman) and for Composition for Non-major Students. He teaches electroacoustic music and supervises individual composition students. He also served as Technical Director for OSSIA New Music during the 2024-2025 season, where he directed concerts involving electronics. Works he operated with OSSIA include Alexander Schubert's Point Ones, Fausto Romitelli's Amok Koma, Yuri Umemoto's SuperBachBoy 3, and Kenta Onoda's Whammy.