Dafna Naphtali

Dafna Naphtali is a singer/instrumentalist/electronic-musician. She composes and performs experimental, interactive electro-acoustic music for 20+ years, using her custom Max/MSP programming for live sound processing of voice and other instruments, as well as works for multi-channel audio and musical robots and drawing on her wide-ranging musical background in jazz, classical, rock and near-eastern music, performing in the US, Europe, India, Russia and the Middle East. Current projects include Audio Chandelier, multi-channel audio work presented in NY and Berlin (Urban Solar Audio Plant), and at IX 2017 Symposium Embodied Spaces, Montreal with 157 speakers.

Her performance piece Robotica for music robots and voice, was at Flea Theater and Avant Music Fest ’16 and continues. Her Walkie Talkie Dream Angles is an “audio augmented-reality” sound walk and personalized interactive composition with U-Gruve platform written for NY’s Washington Square Park.

Dafna’s live sound-processing projects focus on acoustic instrumentalists, in duos with Gordon Beeferman, trombonist Jen Baker (Clip Mouth Unit), Hans Tammen (endangered guitar), and percussionist Luis Tabuenca (Index of Refraction), and in her duo with Chuck Bettis (Chatter Blip).

Performing as a singer, Naphtali also interprets the music of Cage, Stockhausen (performed Stimmung with choreographer Daria Fain and Magic Names ensemble), organized “Voice Activated” public interventions for Make Music NY, and singing work by other contemporary composers in a large range of projects, including Joshua Fried, Shelley Hirsch, Kitty Brazelton, José Halac, music by Yotam Haber and Spanish Civil War songs with the genre-transcending Brooklyn band Barbez, and a recital of Eisler/Brecht Hollywood Liederbuch.

Naphtali has received fellowships and awards for her work including from New York Foundation for the Arts (Music/Sound ‘13, Computer Arts ‘01), New York State Council on the Arts, Franklin Furnace, American Composers Forum, travel grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts and American Music Center, and residencies at Music/OMI, STEIM, and Signal Culture, resulting in new video work. Her discography includes What is it Like to be a Bat?, a digital punk trio with Kitty Brazelton (Tzadik ‘03), work with Chuck Bettis and Hans Tammen, and multiple CDs as side-person and singer. A long term project has been the completion of Machines & Memory, her commissioned pieces since 2010—including Panda Half-Life (for vocal sextet and interactive electronics), Men March (voice/chamber group/live electronics) and Robotica (voice/music robots).