Short Biography
Mathis Nitschke is a composer, sound designer, director, and audio systems developer. His work moves between music theatre, audio technology, spatial sound, interactive media, and intelligent systems.
Nitschke understands composition as the shaping of relationships in sound and time — and, increasingly, of space, perspective, and response. Since his early operas, he has explored how microphones, electroacoustic spaces, and technological mediation can change musical perception; later, movement, interaction, and learning systems themselves became compositional material.
His own works include the operas JETZT (2012) and HAPPY HAPPY (2014), the urban opera VIOLA (2015), the soundwalk opera VERGEHEN (2016), and MAYA (2017), the world’s first mixed-reality opera. With The Planets (2022), created with the Munich Philharmonic, he developed an interactive 3D-audio soundwalk in which listeners can move freely through the spatially distributed sound field of an orchestra.
Alongside his own work, Nitschke composes and designs sound for international theatre, opera, and film productions. Recent projects include Doppelgänger (2023) by Claus Guth with Jonas Kaufmann at the Park Avenue Armory, Don Giovanni (2025) with Sir Simon Rattle at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and Kassandra (2026), directed by Nadja Loschky at Theater Bielefeld. For Michel Houellebecq’s film La Possibilité d’une Île (2008), he composed and produced a large-scale orchestral score; his work also includes music for documentary films and radio drama.
In parallel, Nitschke has worked for many years in spatial audio, automotive UX, and intelligent audio systems. In 2015 he founded Sofilab. Since 2021 he has been developing CORPUS, a European infrastructure for licensed music AI, where he leads an interdisciplinary team and is responsible for product strategy and music intelligence.
Nitschke does not see artistic practice and technical development as separate fields. Technology interests him when it enables new musical experiences, new forms of liveness, and new relationships between people, sound, and space.
Long Biography
Mathis Nitschke is a composer, sound designer, director, and audio systems developer. His work spans music, theatre, audio technology, interactive media, and intelligent systems.
Nitschke understands composition as the shaping of relationships in sound and time — and, increasingly, of space, perspective, and response. Since his early operas, he has explored how microphones, electroacoustic spaces, and technological mediation can change musical perception; later, movement, interaction, and learning systems themselves became compositional material.
That trajectory has taken his work from the stage into public space, interactive sound environments, vehicles, and intelligent audio systems. The technical question, however, remains tied to a musical or perceptual one: which aspects of an experience can be shaped, how does technological mediation alter perception, and how can those relationships eventually be described, modelled, or automated?
Nitschke’s relationship with technology began long before his artistic career. As a teenager, he designed and built analogue studio equipment, including microphone preamps and compressors, designed sound systems, and worked as a live and recording engineer. He acquired most of his knowledge of sound design, audio engineering, tonmeister practice, and complex audio systems independently and through hands-on work. This way of learning still shapes his practice: he enters new technical fields through concrete artistic or acoustic problems.
Composition and Music Theatre
As a composer and music-theatre maker, Nitschke has long been interested in what opera can be today. For JETZT (2012), he developed a three-dimensional surround system that could radically shift the acoustic perspective on the human voice. In HAPPY HAPPY (2014), the microphone itself became a compositional instrument. Amplification, sampling, spatialisation, and technological mediation were not added as effects after the fact, but treated as part of the composition itself.
This led to an ongoing search for new forms of opera and musical experience. Nitschke does not regard the artificiality of sung theatre as a historical remnant, but as one of its particular strengths: a counterpoint to the naturalism of everyday life and contemporary media, and a way of bringing very different artistic layers into a single sensory experience.
With VIOLA (2015), he left the opera house and turned public space itself into the stage. Structure-borne transducers set the windows of a pharmacy vibrating, turning the glass into a sounding membrane between inside and outside. The boundary between audience, performance, and surrounding city began to dissolve.
In VERGEHEN (2016), the audience’s own movement became part of the composition. Smartphone, GPS, and binaural 3D audio connected the real environment along Munich’s River Isar with a virtual sound world. Music no longer unfolded only along a fixed timeline; it became something listeners encountered through their own movement in space.
This line of work culminated in MAYA (2017), the world’s first mixed-reality opera. Staged in the ruins of a former heating plant in Munich-Aubing, the project combined music, sound, live performance, augmented reality, and digital art in a virtual cosmos running alongside the physical world. The smartphone was not simply a technical interface but the central dramaturgical instrument of the work — a kind of “magic magnifying glass” through which the audience could access and navigate a digital layer superimposed on the physical world. Nitschke was responsible for concept, production, scenario, music, and direction.
With Lure (2020), this research continued at the intersection of music, theatre, and learning systems. Working with interaction artists and researchers associated with the Volkswagen Group Machine Learning Research Lab, Nitschke developed a series of prototypes for musical and theatrical interaction with a learning computer character.
Space, Movement, and Interactive Music
Questions of movement, perception, and musical space first led to Inside MPhil – Spring (2019) and then to The Planets (2022). Based on a recording of Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite by the Munich Philharmonic, The Planets became an interactive 3D-audio soundwalk for smartphone and headphones. The seven planets become musical places distributed through a real park. Listeners move freely through the spatially unfolded orchestra, navigate an imaginary shuttle by walking, and follow music and voices through binaural space.
The technology is not used to simulate a concert hall. It creates a different kind of musical perception: the listener’s movement changes perspective, proximity, and musical relationships. Physical space becomes part of the composition. Nitschke was responsible for dramaturgy, sound design, mix, and overall artistic direction.
Stage, Film, and Collaborative Work
Alongside his own projects, Nitschke works continuously as a composer and sound designer in music theatre and spoken theatre. His collaborations include work with Claus Guth, Robert Icke, Simon Rattle, Jonas Kaufmann, and Raphaël Pichon, as well as productions at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the Park Avenue Armory in New York, and major European opera and theatre houses.
In productions such as Doppelgänger (2023) by Claus Guth with Jonas Kaufmann and Helmut Deutsch, or Start Again The Lament (2024) by artist Taryn Simon, musical work is inseparable from the design of complex spatial and electroacoustic systems. Nitschke moves between artistic direction, sound design, musical dramaturgy, and technical system design, leading specialised teams of engineers, musicians, and developers.
More recent stage work includes Don Giovanni (2025), directed by Robert Icke and conducted by Sir Simon Rattle at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and Kassandra (2026), directed by Nadja Loschky at Theater Bielefeld. For Michel Houellebecq’s film La Possibilité d’une Île (2008), Nitschke composed and produced a large-scale orchestral score. He has also written music for documentary films and radio drama.
Audio Technology and Product Development
For many years, Nitschke has also worked in automotive audio and sonic UX. In multi-year advanced-development projects for automotive manufacturers, he develops adaptive and context-sensitive auditory human-machine communication and evaluates its effect through prototypes and user studies.
For Hopium Machina Vision (2022), he developed an information-driven sound concept for the vehicle’s user interface as well as an immersive sound installation for its presentation at the Paris Mondial de l’Auto. He also works repeatedly with HARMAN on automotive demonstrators, sonic UX, and premium-audio applications.
An early example of Nitschke’s work between deep audio-domain knowledge and technical product development is Celemony Capstan. The project began in 2010 with a concrete restoration problem from studio practice: wow and flutter in historical recordings that existing digital tools could not reliably correct. Nitschke brought the problem to Celemony founder Peter Neubäcker, was closely involved in the user-interface design, and subsequently served as Product Manager for Capstan (2011).
Sofilab, CORPUS, and Intelligent Systems
In 2015, Nitschke founded Sofilab, a studio and R&D lab for audio, interaction, and new technologies. Sofilab works at the intersection of sound design, product development, spatial audio, automotive UX, and intelligent systems.
A recurring idea has shaped his work for many years: music that is not a fixed recording, but something that responds to people, places, and situations. Soundwalks, interactive music, and spatial systems gradually led to a larger question: what kind of technical infrastructure would make this form of music possible at scale?
That line of inquiry led to CORPUS, which Nitschke has been developing conceptually since 2021 and which entered implementation in 2024 with support from the European Union. CORPUS is building infrastructure for licensed music AI, bringing together high-quality music data, rights and consent management, semantic music description, technical quality control, and music-intelligence tools within a single system.
As founder and project lead, Nitschke is responsible for product and music-intelligence strategy and leads an interdisciplinary team spanning software engineering, AI, music, design, and research.
A central part of his work is making musical and perceptual problems technically tractable in the first place. Before a system can automate anything, someone has to determine which properties matter, how they can be described, and how the quality of a result should be judged.
This approach has led within CORPUS to semantic music systems, audio-integrity and verification pipelines, methods for detecting synthetically generated music, and tools for intelligent music search and adaptive audio systems.
Agentic Development
Agentic software tools have changed this working method again in 2026. They allow Nitschke to translate audio-domain knowledge and system concepts directly into functioning software and DSP prototypes.
One example is decomb (2026), an experimental real-time DSP system for addressing comb-filter effects in multi-microphone recordings. The project grew from a classic recording-engineering problem through prototyping, measurement, and listening tests into a multi-instance plugin architecture involving real-time processing, DAW host integration, and performance optimisation.
Nitschke does not see artistic practice and technical development as separate activities. New technologies interest him when they arise from an artistic or perceptual need and make genuinely new experiences possible. In both fields, his work is about structuring perception, designing relationships, and creating situations in which sound connects people, spaces, and technologies.
Education and Teaching
Nitschke studied classical guitar at the Richard Strauss Conservatory in Munich, fine art at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, and composition at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague with Gilius van Bergeijk, Richard Ayres, and Clarence Barlow, where he completed his composition studies.
From 2005 to 2007, Nitschke completed a Master of Arts in Media and Communication at the European Graduate School. Particularly formative were seminars and encounters with artists and thinkers including Heiner Goebbels, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Houellebecq, DJ Spooky, Mike Figgis, Peter Greenaway, and The Brothers Quay.
Alongside his artistic and technological practice, Nitschke has taught at universities in Germany and Austria, including institutions in Berlin and St. Pölten.
He developed most of his technical and recording-engineering expertise independently and through professional practice.
