Bio

J.F. Nation is a Master’s student in Georgia Tech’s Music Tech program. Their research focuses on augmenting historical artifacts with electronic instruments and historically informed performance practices. By incorporating critical-making techniques, science and technology studies, and sound studies, their work sonifies colonial, ecological, and queer injustices.

Building on their BA in Music & physics minor from Cornell University, their studies include composition, instrument design, and sociological critiques of technoscience.

As a non-binary identifying person, their voice has been an integral part of their musical journey. While instrument design initially was a means to circumvent economic barriers to musical experimentation, their experiences in luthiery and acoustics have translated well to their work at Georgia Tech, focusing on music technology for augmenting extreme vocal techniques. By expanding access to vocal expressivity from within the rigid paradigm of extreme metal, they endeavor to utilize the sonic vocabulary of the genre to critique ongoing historical injustices that influence metal’s brutalist culture.

In their childhood, they lived across the world, moving every 2-4 years. They lived in Syria and Egypt during the Arab Spring and were evacuated multiple times. Having witnessed firsthand the legacies of colonialism, their recent work has focused on tracing the evolution of technology from a social lens. Informed by the methodologies of Science and Technology Studies (STS), their works, such as the Flower Flute and the Scold’s Bridle, seek to sonify historical conflict as embodied within artefacts of the past. They hope that by using music technology to augment technologies of domination, the networks of power underpinning their design can be better seen — and heard.