Jacob Richman is a mixed-media composer whose work explorers the relationship between sight and sound in live performance.  His pieces mix live-processed moving images (film and video), music, and sound to create interactive, multimedia settings in which performers can interact.

Jacob was born in Chicago in 1981, and grew up there and in Sacramento, California.  He has played jazz bass and classical trombone since his youth, and graduated with a joint BA in
music composition and film/video from Harvard University. He later received his MA in
Media Arts from the University of Michigan.  He has studied composition with
Bernard Rands, electro-acoutic composition Kurt Stallmann, and studied
film/video/mixed-media with Robb Moss, Ross McElwee, Hal Hartley,
Steven Subotnick, and Andrew Kirshner.  His pieces have been performed
in NYC, Boston, as well as in Michigan.  He was recently a Lecturer in Video
at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, and has
been awed by the opportunity he has had to learn from his many
talented students. He is currently a doctoral student in Media Arts
in the MEME Department at Brown University.

Jacob’s use of mixed-media is always in an attempt to express a certain subject or experience to which he is deeply drawn.  The particular relationships between sound and image, such as movement, tempo, subject matter, as well as the media and performers he chooses to work with depend on these
subjects.  At this point they have included such
disparate things as a favorite poem, an old lullaby,
Sardinian folk singing, and a herd of elk. 

He is fascinated by what he sees in his subjects
as the interconnectedness of things: people
with places, sounds with textures, humans
with animals, plants and the natural world.
He feels that exploring the relationships
between sounds and images in
performance is an effective way
to both investigate and convey
these greater inherent
connections that
surround us.