2026 Desiderata music
Drone ambient made purely from manipulated voice and breath. Microtonally vocoded with oceans and insects, layered, stretched, recorded in odd places, and sampled (including speech synthesis) to produce a cyborg flesh-scape.
xyh is a Filipino/Ilonggo-Japanese creator working through intermedia art, experimental pop, electronic literature, science, technology, and its studies, theory and philosophy, and social action. Their work orbits issues of selfhood, media, posthuman relations, ecological-technological worlds, and the ways cultures metabolize systems.
They are currently based in Manila, Philippines. They hold a BS in Physics from the University of the Philippines Diliman and are currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing. They are actively working in music, from composing film scores, audio engineering, and being a session musician.



Drone ambient made purely from manipulated voice and breath. Microtonally vocoded with oceans and insects, layered, stretched, recorded in odd places, and sampled (including speech synthesis) to produce a cyborg flesh-scape.
An open generative poetry deck assembled live from outside language. Each draw queries keyless sources, cuts retrieved fragments into a poem, builds a collage from public image searches, and returns its synthesized title to the deck; operator cards can replace, reinterpret, return, mash, or skip cards in the reading.
A browser-based 3D text editor for writing and arranging text as spatial objects. Users can style fragments and move, rotate, or extrude them in three dimensions, then export the view as a transparent PNG or exchange the scene as Stanzuary JSON or portable .tabota events.
An experimental television instrument that threads a luminance field along six space-filling scan curves, transmits the resulting waveform through a phenomenological multipath atmosphere, then recovers sync and reconstructs the picture. The same delayed echo becomes a raster ghost, Hilbert blur, or scattered snow because each standard maps one-dimensional signal time to two-dimensional space differently.
A software suite built on the observation that digital errors inherit the geometry of the systems that fail. Its tools replace raster rows, codec blocks, and fixed glyph metrics with blobs, Voronoi territories, filaments, wet fields, or independent vectors, so corruption can seep, spread, and decay.
A video effect in which noised Voronoi regions stop refreshing their source pixels, continue to advect under optical flow, and accept content from a later frame or a second clip. This combines the visual-field shape of a scintillating scotoma with acausal, non-macroblock datamosh.
Pixel sorting confined to expanding lichen-, mycelium-, dendrite-, or slime-mold-shaped regions. Growth topology replaces the raster row or column as the sorting path.
A shader that replaces the regular RGB-triad lattice with silt cells, Gaussian bodies, or weighted Voronoi territories; a block grid remains as a control. Geometry and signal memory vary independently, combining dry refresh, remanence, or advected wet feedback with turbulence, chromatic bleed, Kawase bloom, and subtractive Umbra.
A browser-based granular resynthesizer tuned for gurgling sounds. It turns a loaded sample into irregular pitch bends, time warps, overlapping bursts, and filter movement, then feeds the result through convolution reverb.
A text renderer that treats each character as an independently perturbed vector object. Seeded controls vary size, rotation, spacing, baseline, color, opacity, blur, breathing, and chromatic ghosts; users can load OTF or TTF fonts and export SVG or PNG.
Browser-based codecs and native file formats built for databending. Ooid stores Gaussian blobs, Scute stores Voronoi territories, Vermis stores samples along a Hilbert filament, and Urumizuri stores a wet-state ink matrix; byte or text edits therefore deform those structures instead of exposing a conventional raster or block codec.
A continuous space-filling Hilbert-thread image codec using DPCM color deltas.
A wet-state snapshot codec storing Bakezuri's fluid ink matrix as byte-editable material data.
A suite of offline audio and video effects that process a static file as a complete span. Whole-file access allows an effect to respond before an event, filter in both temporal directions, measure across passes, and optimize against the file's full distribution.
A model of magnetic print-through for audio and video. Mapping a complete clip onto a wound reel lets adjacent wraps exchange amplitude or image content, producing pre-echo, post-echo, drift, wear, and VHS bleed with WAV or WebM export.
An offline reverb that maps each event's release-to-next-onset gap, then fits or ducks its tail to the available span. The next event's level supplies masking credit, so inaudible spill need not be suppressed.
An acausal granular delay and sidechain processor that reads both files before rendering. A control signal supplies a future amplitude envelope; a source signal supplies pristine taps or grains, with negative delay, lookahead ducking, tempo-synced time, feedback, pitch, and pan controls.
An offline dynamics processor that measures the file's amplitude distribution and maps it to a drawn transfer curve. The RMS window moves continuously from sample-level waveshaping to whole-file normalization.
A video feedback field computed across a complete clip. Future and past frames can feed the current frame, producing trails before events and symmetric zero-phase wakes; rendered frames are cached for immediate scrubbing.
A stationarizer that analyzes a finite sound, redistributes selected grains across time, and renders a statistically even texture long enough to sample without an audible loop.
A set of equation-first synthesizers that expose spectral structure, tuning, modulation, and feedback as editable mathematics.
A pure additive synthesizer for writing spectral series as summations, envelopes, and conditionals. Its offline equation parser and phase-exact AudioWorklet support fractional, irrational, subharmonic, and drift-modulated partial ratios.
A resonant additive synthesizer that maps custom equations onto a noise-driven resonator bank, with painted partials, Gaussian, Lorentzian, or Voigt spectral distributions, microtonal macro-detuning, and offline WAV rendering.
A phase-modulation synthesizer that replaces box-and-wire algorithm charts with live equations, arbitrary operator graphs, feedback loops, continuous drift, and non-integer ratios.
A WebGL simulator of light passing through frosted, fluted, or hammered glass. A progressive slice renderer combines height-map normals, distance-dependent blur, Fresnel reflection, and Beer–Lambert absorption; a Frutiger Aero interface exposes the optical model.
A hue-remapping editor that models color transforms as circle maps S¹ → S¹ on a torus. A spline with winding-degree controls drives HSL or OKLCH remapping; the tool visualizes the map on a projected torus and exports a 3D LUT.
A multi-tap delay and reverb generator that derives tap times by ray-tracing sound through a spherically symmetric graded-index atmospheric channel. Users draft trajectories, inspect a 3D wavefront, and convolve stereo audio offline with the resulting tap set.
A drag-and-drop tool for arranging images into justified rows, grids, columns, or freeform collages, then copying the result or exporting a high-resolution layout.
International Conference on Timbre · presenter
A paper arguing that physical modeling does not recover a fixed timbre from mechanism. Virtual instruments construct timbral identity by selecting materials, mediation, acoustic space, bodily cues, and assumed listening competencies; each design therefore commits to a particular account of what the instrument is and which parts of its sound matter.
A wet-print simulator that deposits quantized image separations into a shared field modeled on risograph printing and suminagashi. Inks bleed, repel, fix, and misregister; .bakezuri stores the process recipe, while .urumizuri exposes the wet-state matrix for databending.
A zero-dependency JavaScript library and companion web tool that computes the largest safe content rectangle inside any CSS border-radius, including irregular per-corner elliptical radii. It returns the fitted frame, ready-to-use padding insets, and per-side maximum lengths, with full handling of percentage radii and the browser's overflow-clamp behavior.
An internet-radio drift device that moves through live stations from the Radio Browser database, holding each for a randomized interval before crossfading or cutting onward. Listeners can hold or skip stations, annotate favorites, and export the session as a plain-text tasting log.
A post-MIDI composition tool and JSON notation for microtonal, polymetric, and time-based media. Its editors draw held tones, glides, pitch contours, and voice assignments; Cycla builds recursive subdivision grammars and exports .cyc time maps. TaboTa translates among beats, seconds, unordered cues, frequencies, categories, and instructions: where .scl files tune pitch, .cyc files tune time.
bio-art poem · digital interface & living punctuation
A physical and browser poem that isolates the commas in José García Villa’s “I, it, was, that, saw,” and transfers their coordinates through a stencil into mung bean sprouts on black gulaman. The germinating punctuation turns Villa’s cultivatory image into a temporary domestic response to agricultural and water anxiety around the developing 2026 El Niño; the interface lets readers fade between the source punctuation and its living transfer.
Artem Research Collective · Zine 3
An autotheoretical essay arguing that haunting is produced jointly by cultural memory and technical mediation. Filipino multo, Japanese yūrei, vaporwave, Hiroshima, U.S.–Philippine colonial memory, and Ringu show ghosts taking form through specific bodies, rituals, media systems, infrastructures, and habits of recognition; hauntotechnics names that mutual modification.
A physical gelatin poem and an interactive browser counterpart. Four clear gel strata suspend fragments of cut-up documents so depth determines which texts remain legible; the interface models the same block and lets readers change its virtual cut depth to expose lower layers.
A browser-based poem, art game, and ASCII terrarium set on a nocturnal balcony above an impossible city. WASD movement, inspectable textual specimens, movable objects, randomized vistas, changing weather, and a reactive sound engine make the terminal window behave as a small ecology.
An experimental play set in a pandemic-era biopsy room where three forgotten tumors—Glioblastoma, Meningioma, and Hematoma—become conscious and perform the roles of doctors, patients, administrators, and staff. Their biomass grows into a hospital of flesh, wires, mold, and paperwork; medical realism, bureaucratic absurdity, and body horror model how care, debt, migration, and public health assign people to institutional roles.
A family of browser instruments in which animated 2D bodies are both interface and sound source. Size, geometry, motion, contact, pressure, tension, or environmental data control each instrument's synthesis and spatialization; users play them by seeding, striking, bowing, plucking, dragging, or disturbing the simulated ecology.
A percussion environment where visual cell bodies act as membrane resonators to produce gong-like strikes shaped by size, drift, and collision.
A fluid acoustic environment where live marine data such as wave height, period, and current velocity directly dictates the harmonic detuning, spectral tilt, and resonant breathing of floating cellular bodies.
A modal-synthesis instrument that generates glass-metal clusters by mapping acoustic traits to nonliteral visible properties like lightness, jaggedness, and hue.
A playable connective graph where drawing and plucking fibers translates structural tension, friction, and topological strain into string and reed-like sounds.
A generative geological interface that translates real-time global tectonic data into bathyal sub-harmonics and physical collisions.
A flocking simulation that generates a shimmering network of oscillator pings through proximity and collisions, actively tuned by live atmospheric conditions.
A pressure-sensitive aerophone colony of pore-like entities that exhales autonomous, randomized breathing sounds governed directly by live weather data.
A browser-based formant-synthesis instrument in which drifting IPA glyphs act as sounding bodies. Position in vowel space controls a vocal-tract model that produces speech-like syllables without resolving into language.
A browser-based video feedback processor for frame accumulation, motion smear, and video reverb. Controls govern memory decay, opacity, drift, zoom, rotation, chromatic split, edge inscription, brightness persistence, and softening; results can be previewed, captured, or exported.
A specialized Kontakt vocal-organ virtual instrument built entirely from custom, self-recorded vocal samples and custom script controls.
A browser instrument in which moving plankton drive FM synthesis through color, collisions, and rippling microtonal fields.
A WebGL image warper that applies animated noise fields, lens distortion, chromatic offset, seamless tiling, and hue or saturation shifts to uploaded images. Live microphone input can modulate the field.
A procedural sound engine that generates chirps, murmurs, droplets, and filtered grains for imaginary creatures. It maps robot states such as thinking, transcribing, and crafting to distinct vocal behaviors, and also runs as a standalone browser toy.
short film · music composer
Composed for a short film that incorporates cleaning materials as sound sources, blending Southern California influences with modern orchestration.
Won Best Pilot Script at The Comedy Film Festival (Austin, Texas) and Official Selection at the HollyShorts Film Festival (Glendale, California).
voice & keyboard synthesizer · with bower gra! & blend.earth · organized by Joee Mejias
Live free improvisation performance.
Confound the Time: Reception in Medieval & Early Modern Studies · academic conference presentation & paper
A paper treating dungeon synth as mediated world-building rather than a revival of medieval music. Its synthetic medievalism is assembled from Norwegian black metal, American and Japanese game music, early MIDI and sound chips, fantasy literature, tabletop games, zines, pixel art, and online genre formation; the genre returns to late-twentieth-century media that had already converted the medieval into fantasy.
A browser and Windows utility that concatenates files into one searchable .txt while preserving each source path, size, type, and delimiter.
An interactive web timeline and timekeeper presenting a Filipino adaptation of the Japanese 72 microseasons (七十二候).
Diana Aviado's Kaos Magick · with Tusa Montes (Saronay, Kulintang, Tambi)
An intermedia project exploring the primordial Hadean eon through atonal music, custom tech, generative video, and live audiovisual performance. Queers the idea of the stable sun by drawing on the physics of unstable plasma and early earth and moon formation.composer, performer, tech
Digital-organic soundscape from manipulated '90s and Y2K OS startup sounds, linking primordial creation to digital initialization.
Starts with the synthesizer palettes of Dungeon Synth but subjects them to with atonal, arrhythmic, spectral, and microtonal principles. culminates in a noisy climax featuring processed samples of Filipino indigenous instruments (Saronay, Kulintang, Tambi).
Voice, synth, and drum piece sung from the perspective of the colliding protoplanet Theia — microtonal melody, guttural vocalization, voice-electronic hybridization.
Browser-based WebGL generative visualizer and live tool: an audio-reactive noise field driven by a fully configurable gradient system.
Antemelos is a hertz-native, scale-free melody generator for creating monophonic vocal lines that remain singable while sounding unstable, primordial, and unresolved. Built as both an Eosforos instrument and a Tabota emitter, it treats `.tabota` as the lossless home for continuous pitch contours, with MIDI as a secondary projection..
Quezon City Biennial · with Krus na Ligas residents, the LGU & UP Institute of Biology
A research-art and poetry installation that reimagines the street map of Krus na Ligas as a living plant assemblage. Roads recreated from color-inverted images of local flora, printed on acetate and suspended over a window — cyanotype-like glyphs, lightboxes, talismans, x-rays of unseen city blocks.
Wrote the exhibition text for Ang Paglaho ng Bagong Mundo sa mga Araw ng Nakaraan. art writer
Long, looped ambient videos made from non-explicit transitional footage in archival gay adult media from the 1980s on — isolating rooms, hallways, pools, beds. Shifts attention from action to atmosphere, anticipation, and disappearance; on queer temporality and the ephemerality of worlds that may no longer exist.
live score for a short film by Bea Mariano · live scorer, sound artist, composer, writer, vocal performer
A live score performance integrating sound art, music, and vocal performance. Digital vocal pieces, field recordings, microsound, and ambient music.
An audio poetic monologue.
A media art algorithmic poem generating an archipelago based on special Unicode characters and scripts of cultures with precolonial contact with Manila.
Physical installation with Orange Pi and monitor. Curated by Dayang Yraola.
with Bea Mariano · live score
A short film and videopoem made with Bea Mariano, accompanied by my live score. It stitches the wreck of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, Manila construction sites, archival photographs, handwashing footage, microorganisms, and ocean imagery to examine how American military history remains embedded in Philippine development. The title connects cargo records, apparitions, futures made material, and manifest destiny; construction workers rotated sideways become divers moving through the same Pacific archive.
Philosophy & Digitality · academic paper
A paper analyzing artificial interaction partners through the social roles they already perform rather than as containers of hidden consciousness. AIBO, android Buddhist figures, companion robots, and LLMs show personhood emerging through communicative affordances involving affect, ritual, kinship, and care; the cases are drawn from Japanese robotics and relational accounts of personhood.
Feeling Formal · Nanyang Technological University · academic and literary/artistic presentation for a workshop on theories of emotion · researcher, participant, presenter
A study of relational accounts of emotion and personhood through Tagalog concepts of loób and kapwa as theorized largely in Metro Manila, participant interviews, literary analysis, and autoethnography. It does not treat these terms as a national Filipino ontology: Hiligaynon, for example, has no direct equivalent of kapwa. Cases involving hiyâ, kilíg, and húgot test how feeling crosses language, ethical judgment, social expectation, perception, and performance.
Saliksik-Musika II · University of the Philippines · academic and musical/artistic presentation for an international forum on music · researcher, participant, presenter
A presentation analyzing Night Bus as an intermedia song within Of Another Shore. Enjambed sung lines, asemic vocality, timbre, polytonality, ostinato, and electronic processing connect songwriting to poetic practice; references to soliranin and indolanin move rowing and work-song rhythms into urban transit without claiming to reconstruct unrecorded historical forms.
Mono by Phono · conceptualizer, event designer, performer, composer as Cyberpaean
A vaporwave listening and social gathering hosted by Mono by Phono, using archival sound, image, fashion, commercials, and film footage to organize programs around Philippine cultural memory. Sets move among 1990s OPM, 1980s ballads, Martial Law-era disco, Manila Sound, film soundtracks, and folk songs. The project later became Piyesta Plaza 1985–1995 Airwaves, an album and live audiovisual performance about Philippine pop culture, People Power and its aftermath, and the early-1990s earthquakes.
Full-length album and live A/V performance on the 1986 People Power Revolution and the early-90s earthquakes.
A web-based slide poem presented through animated text fragments, blue gradients, and subtitle-like placement. Arrow, swipe, and keyboard navigation pace the text across screens associated with water, depth, and disappearance.
An algorithmic poem based on the ILOVEYOU virus, written through its creator's imagined persona and a postcolonial account of internet access and desire. Its words are replaced one by one with ILOVEYOU until the phrase overtakes the text and the poem performs its own viral collapse.
A lo-fi spoken-word poem recorded on a phone during an early-morning walk. Breath, footsteps, and traffic hold together a roadside animal death and an eroticized approaching runner, placing observation, fantasy, desire, violence, and complicity in the same field recording.
Animated asemic writing short.
Serial digital poem with web 1.0 aesthetics.
A web-based poetic sequence about body porosity in the 2000s Philippines. A Filipino-Japanese neuroqueer speaker conducts television, dial-up internet, typhoons, political unrest, language, ghosts, floods, and voltage; electricity links nervous sensation to infrastructure, weather, media, and empire.
Web-based audio visualizer crossfading between two images.
Atipan+ General Workshop 2025 · intern, artist-researcher, developer, translator, facilitator
A participatory "Affect Atlas" — a menstrual-awareness workshop method using storytelling, word-image mapping, and performance across Panay and Guimaras. Personal output: a critical essay and digital installation on how humor, mapping, and performance make stigmatized topics discussable while producing qualitative data.
Self-reflexive essay, generative affect weaving for data dramatization, and interactive map.
Presented for Day of Action for Women's Health.
Three textual-visual works combining hand and digital drawing, maps, diagrams, manipulated photographs, poetry, prose, and asemic writing. Police diagrams, scrapbooks, and hand-drawn cartography supply formats for recording disappearance through traces and uncertainty without converting it into death or recovery.
A web-based image processing system that reconceptualizes hue as a relational, topological medium. A user-defined anchor hue transforms colors through attraction, repulsion, inversion, compression, and expansion across the color wheel, without touching saturation or luminosity. HSL or OKLCH; CPU or GPU.
An intermedia suite linking electronic literature, experimental pop, videopoetry, web art, performance scores, and simulations through a decentralized hypertext. Its shore is the present: a boundary where personal, ancestral, geological, virtual, remembered, and speculative times remain adjacent but inaccessible to one another. Individual works use that structure to test how identity and inheritance are assembled across incompatible media and temporal scales.
An interactive literature collection organized as a periodic table of the seven metalloids. Each element’s physical and chemical properties constrain a different work—New Weird fiction, body horror, kinetic poetry, science writing, nonfiction, or prose poetry—about objects including termite symbiosis, programmable skin, undersea cables, metallic wolves, and radioactive decay.
The British Academy · researcher
researcher
LLMs and the Patterns of Human Language Use · Denkwerkstatt Berlin · researcher, participant, presenter
An ongoing suite of electronic literature, videopoetry, docupoetry, and web art about the afterlives of disaster from a Filipino-Japanese perspective. The 1990 Luzon earthquake, 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, and 2020 Taal eruption organize works about the post-Marcos state, Japan’s Lost Decades, the pandemic-era internet, family memory, and inherited trauma. Browser poems, movable windows, archival video, blackout editing, and Windows XP interfaces make each geological rupture a point from which different historical times are read.
An LLM co-authored hypertext lyric essay presented as a continuously scrolling academic paper. Through recursive writing, footnotes, and AI-generated language, the work examines language, documents, humans, environments, and LLMs as surface-based archives shaped by bias, extraction, historical debris, and collaborative knowledge production.
A hypertext collage poem whose images and text fragments link outward to academic papers, public-domain archives, found media, recordings, forums, discarded materials, and commercial packaging. Citation is both structure and subject: the linked fragments model identity as an arrangement of references shaped by academia, plastics, capitalism, globalization, and ecological crisis.
researcher, developer · policy research
Developed the Makwela — a geographical, participatory, and photovoice-driven storytelling method with an interactive map.
The Second Congressional Commission on Education · documenter, researcher · policy research
Pop ballad.
Resident DJ, fashion designer, event coordinator, 3D mesh artist. Curated genre sets (vaporwave, exotica, electro swing, seapunk, EBM, noise) as temporary worlds — designing posters, building sets, changing skies. Plus avatar fashion impossible in physical space: dresses made from floating pearls, leaves, blobs, dandelion particles. Blender · Substance Painter
science advisor, graphic designer, composer, social media assistant
streamer, video and audio editor, music composer, social media assets · actual play TTRPG group
music composer, sound designer, sound recordist · documentary
End credits piece built from melodic fragments of Ilonggo folksongs.
Three-piece outfit inspired by the namesake cultivar: pants, innerwear, and outerwear. Plus a crafted iridescent cockroach ring.
A meterless song built from multiplied harp recordings, granular synthesis, ocean field sound, and a voice that distorts into the instrumental field. The siren is treated as a digitally mediated voice whose source cannot be separated from its transmission.
An IDM-pop song combining synthesized kicks, household recordings, musique concrète edits, soft distortion, and a hybrid acoustic-electronic plucked instrument. Its blabber-like lyrics place surveillance inside an unstable field of digital and analog sound objects.
short film · music composer
A narrative animation score combining gongs, bamboo instruments, and guitars with a contemporary orchestral and electronic soundtrack palette.
Film nominated for Best Director and Best Cinematography at the Las Vegas Filipino Short Film Festival 2025.
short film · music composer
A Manila interpretation of neon-noir: a synth-driven soundtrack using field recordings, noise, and rougher textures, moving away from glossy slickness toward something grimier and more unstable.
Awarded Best Short Film at the FilAm Creative Film Festival 2023. Film nominated for Best Editing and Bahaghari / LGBTQ Award at the Las Vegas Filipino Short Film Festival 2025.
Electronic experimental chamber pop.
Vector-based self-portrait.
Crooked Tree Records · lead singer, music composer, producer, mixing & mastering, album artist
A six-track synthpop and vaporpop EP made with Brazilian artist MASM, combining industrial music, bossa nova, trap EDM, eurodance, R&B, and minimalism through deliberately degraded playback. I co-wrote, sang, produced, mixed, mastered, and designed the album art, combining 3D and vector graphics with paper, VHS, and digital damage.
A total-serial song setting a shrill head-voice melody against a repeating synthesizer loop in 7/4.
Tumblr blog for experimental menswear.
Odd-meter shoegaze/dream pop with reggae elements.
Experimental chamber pop.
Re.Doubt 2 · Belfort and Bastion Publishing · contributing author · fiction
High Chair, Issue 16 · contributing author · poetry
Drone/noise with chant.
keyboards, secondary vocals, arrangement
Filipino Freethinkers · contributing author · non-fiction, science writing
Filipino Freethinkers · music composer · introduction music
Piano pop song.
music composer & glass harp performer · concert with audiovisual sections
Music composed from non-human nature sounds.
Asian Composer's League
Instrumental electronic music based on simple waveforms, Philippine gongs, and vertical composition.