The Frost School of Music has been selected to host the 26th Annual Festival and Conference of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS). The event will feature some 14 concerts, sound installations, papers, and two special multimedia listening rooms from January 20 to 22, with concerts taking place at Gusman and Clarke Recital Halls. All concerts are free and open to the public.

This year’s festival features electronic music icon Laurie Anderson, who has been called “America’s multi-mediatrix” by Wired magazine. Other guest artists will include computer-music pioneer Max Mathews, inventor of the first computer language to generate sounds digitally, and composer-author Jon Appleton, co-inventor of the first performance digital synthesizer. Concerts presented at the festival will include a variety of compositions for laptop orchestras, surround-sound playback, video, acoustic instruments that interact with laptops, robotic cello, iPhones, and iPads.

Guest performers will include the Greater Miami Youth Symphony, cello virtuoso Madeleine Shapiro, internationally renowned clarinetists Esther Lamneck and Arthur Campbell, and many others.

“Music and technology have co-existed for centuries,” says Colby Leider, associate professor at the Frost School of Music. “This event simply presents a snapshot of what creative people around the country are doing in the early part of this century.”

For more information, visit www.seamus2011.org.