Tom Hall is a Tasmanian, Australian electronic audio-visual artist who now calls Los Angeles home. With a two-decade career in the music industry across multiple continents, Hall’s journey has been expansive. His educational background includes graduating from the Australian National University, majoring in Media Arts, and pursuing further studies in sound at Kyoto Seika University, which laid the foundation for his artistic pursuits.
In 2006, Hall founded the first Australian Ableton Live User group, becoming one of only four such groups worldwide at the time. His passion for music and sound design led him to become an alpha tester for Ableton in 2007, contributing to developing and refining the groundbreaking music software.
Hall is credited with creating the first-ever Max for Live educational series, now with over two million views, developed for Cycling ‘74. His expertise and presentations have earned him main-stage appearances and masterclasses at all Ableton Loop events.
Hall works with a deep fascination with the interpolation of time, the exploration of peripheral environments, phenomenology, and the non-linearity of everyday life. Drawing from diverse approaches, he recontextualizes these concepts to create soundscapes and visual imagery that merge in hybrid audio-visual environments, offering unique translations of temporality. His artistic expression encompasses found and computer-programmed sound synthesis, reactive visual synthesis, and physical installations, performing and presenting to audiences worldwide.
Hall’s versatility as a sound designer and programmer sees him regularly collaborating and working for renowned companies such as Cycling ’74, Ableton, Eventide, Moog, Korg, Roli, Roland, Arturia, Expressive E, Output, and KMI. His creative input (R&D) on projects like the Beatstep Pro, Arturia Minibrute2s, Microfreak, and Minifreak has left a notable mark on the music technology landscape.
Since 2019, Hall has been a founding member of the Space Song Foundation and has actively contributed his expertise to the Tree of Life project, collaborating with world-leading scientists (NASA/JPL) and artists in a 200-year interstellar art endeavor.
Beyond his solo career, Hall extends his skills to custom sound design, music hardware, and programming custom software for esteemed artists such as Nine Inch Nails, Will.I.Am, Miike Snow, Pantha du Prince, and Fast & Furious composer Lucas Vidal. A decade-plus tenure (ongoing) as a full-time developer at Cycling ’74, the makers of the programming language MaxMSP/Jitter & Max for Live further cements him as a sought-after and influential figure in the music industry.
Hall is also a Professor at the University of Southern California’s (USC) Thornton School of Music, working across both the Music Technology and Composition departments specializing in Advanced Audio Synthesis and DSP, Live Performance Technology, and Programming for Digital Media and Computer Music.