Department Head: Prof. Shai Cohen
Prof. Shai Cohen is an Associate Professor, composer, sound artist, and researcher. He serves as Head of the Department of Music and Director of the Music and Technology Program at Bar-Ilan University.
His artistic and academic work brings together musical composition, electroacoustic music, computational audio analysis, interactive systems, artificial intelligence, music cognition, and interdisciplinary research. His compositions, installations, and performances explore the relationships between acoustic sound, electronic processes, visual media, and algorithmic structures.
His music has been performed in Israel and internationally by orchestras, ensembles, and performers including the SNU Symphony Orchestra, the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, musicians from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the T’ang Quartet, the Israel Contemporary Players, and the Meitar Ensemble. His work has received several prizes and distinctions, including the Prime Minister’s Prize for Music Achievement, the ACUM Menachem Avidom Prize, the Aberdeen Music Prize, and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos Composition Prize.
What is your vision for the Department of Music?
I see the Department of Music as a meeting place: between artistic creation and academic research, between tradition and innovation, and between music and fields such as psychology, education, mathematics, engineering, computer science, and digital media.
Music today is created, studied, taught, and experienced in many different ways. A contemporary music department must therefore provide strong disciplinary foundations while also encouraging students and researchers to move between fields, methods, and forms of knowledge.
My aim is to strengthen the department as an open and collaborative academic community—one in which composition, musicology, ethnomusicology, music education, music therapy, cognition, performance, and technology enrich one another.
Why study music?
Music is not merely an object of study. It is a way of listening, thinking, creating, communicating, and understanding human experience.
Studying music develops close attention, imagination, critical thinking, historical awareness, and the ability to recognize complex relationships. These abilities are relevant not only to musicians but also to educators, researchers, therapists, technologists, and people working in many other cultural and professional fields.
A degree in music does not lead to one predetermined destination. It provides a foundation from which students can develop their own intellectual, artistic, and professional paths.
What makes the Department of Music at Bar-Ilan distinctive?
The department brings together an unusually broad range of musical disciplines. Students encounter historical and theoretical research, ethnomusicology, musical education, composition, music therapy, psychology and music, performance, and advanced musical technologies.
This breadth creates opportunities for genuine interdisciplinary work. A student may combine music with psychology, education, mathematics, engineering, computer science, visual media, or other fields, while remaining part of a strong musical and academic community.
The department is also distinguished by the close connection it fosters between theory and practice. Research can grow out of artistic creation, technology can become a compositional instrument, and musical activity can provide a platform for studying cognition, learning, communication, and social interaction.
How do music and technology connect in your work?
For me, technology is not an external addition to music. It is a medium through which musical ideas can be examined, transformed, and newly imagined.
My work includes electroacoustic and interactive composition, digital sound processing, audiovisual systems, computational analysis, and the development of tools for musical creation and research. Recent projects examine how audio-analysis objects, algorithms, and artificial-intelligence systems can function as transparent and interpretable compositional partners rather than as inaccessible “black boxes.”
Technology also creates connections between artistic practice and empirical research. The same computational tools that allow us to transform sound can help us examine performance, listening, synchrony, creativity, and musical learning.
What do you hope students will gain from their studies?
Above all, I hope students develop curiosity, independence, and confidence in their own musical and intellectual voices.
Students should leave the department with knowledge and practical abilities, but also with the capacity to formulate meaningful questions, select appropriate methods, collaborate with people from different disciplines, and remain open to unexpected discoveries.
An academic music education should not simply provide answers. It should enable students to recognize which questions are worth asking.
What might we find in your studio?
Scores, microphones, loudspeakers, sensors, cables, controllers, computers, musical instruments, unfinished algorithms, and many sound files whose future role is not yet clear.
The studio is both a laboratory and a compositional space. It is a place where musical materials are recorded and transformed, but also where ideas are tested through listening. Sometimes a technological experiment becomes a composition; at other times, a compositional problem leads to a research question or to the development of a new tool.
That movement between listening, making, and investigating is at the center of my work—and of the academic environment I hope to cultivate in the department.
