Technology Team
One of our proudest accomplishments is assembling a dazzling team of respected music and technology professionals.
Anatoly Larkin, D.M.A. – Director, Performance Analysis
Dr. Larkin leads the music production projects at Zenph Sound Innovations. He was born near Moscow, Russia. At the age of 13, he and his family moved to Great Britain, where he attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, studying composition with Robert Saxton and piano with Paul Roberts and Alexandra Andrievsky. During that time he was active in promoting new music, including premieres of his own works. He also pursued his passion for computers by getting familiar with the computer technology used in electronic composition. He received a Master's degree from the University of Minnesota in 2004 and completed his Doctorate of Musical Arts in 2007, studying under Alexander Braginsky, co-founder of the International Piano-e-Competition. His doctoral research captures his intimate understanding of micro-timing in music performance. Anatoly continues to compose and support new music, and has continued his concert appearances.
Kim Mayton – Director, Software Development
Kim is responsible for architecting the next generation of Zenph's tools for editing performance data for multiple instruments. He brings 25 years of experience in user interface design and framework development to the team. Kim's previous experience includes the development of network performance monitoring systems at Wandel and Goltermann, Ganymede Software, NetIQ, and NetQoS as well as developing a wireless advertising system at Windwire/Avesair.
Tad Hardin, D.M.A. – Production Manager
Dr. Hardin has enjoyed an active performance career as a chamber musician, soloist, and vocal coach. His recital engagements and master classes have taken him to venues throughout the U.S., Canada, South America, and Europe, with recent debuts in London and Milan. His performances have included numerous guest artist series along with broadcasts on Florida Public Radio and Bolivian national television. He currently coaches and accompanies singers with the North Carolina Opera and performs a diverse mix of vocal and instrumental recital programs, including his own piano-percussion ensemble, Duo Matre.
Tad earned his master's and doctoral degrees in collaborative piano performance from Florida State University College of Music. Prior to joining Zenph, he taught in the Conservatory of Music at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Jeff Aldridge – Senior Quality Assurance Engineer
After working in the world of Networking Software development for more than 20 years, Jeff is thrilled to find an opportunity at Zenph that leverages his skills as a software quality engineer. No longer spending his days in the bits and bytes of network performance measurements, he's now in charge of ensuring the quality of Zenph's new music re-performance editing software.
Jeff's prior roles with GE, IBM, Ganymede, NetIQ, NetQoS and CA, prepared him well for the Quality Engineering role he's now playing at Zenph. While Jeff has been known to moonlight as a singer/actor on occasion with the likes of the NC Opera Company, NCSU's University Theatre, and others, he never dreamed music would be a part of his day job. "Of course with Zenph's precision technology, it's still about the bits and bytes, but what a cool way to use them!"
Philip Amalong – Senior Producer
Phil is originally from the Philadelphia area where he received his early musical training. After winning a Van Cliburn scholarship, he attended The University of Cincinnati College - Conservatory of Music (CCM). He earned Bachelor and Master of Music degrees in piano performance and collaborative piano from CCM and remained in Cincinnati while developing an active career as a solo and collaborative artist, both on stage and in recordings.
His recordings are released on Albany, Eroica, and Titanic labels and his 2009 release, Touch: The Toccata Project, has been acclaimed by international music press. He has performed and recorded with soloists and principal orchestral musicians from around the world, and is a frequent clinician and presenter at festivals and conferences. He is a founding member of Conundrum, a contemporary chamber music ensemble based in Cincinnati. From 1998-2010, Phil was a faculty member at the College of Mount St. Joseph and chaired the department from 2007-2010. He previously taught piano at Xavier University.
Phil also composes both commercial and concert music. His concert pieces have been featured at the Fresno New Music Festival in performance by Conundrum and others. In the late 1980s, while still a student, he co-founded Prime Time Productions, a boutique music composition and production company. In 11 years with Prime Time, he composed and produced hundreds of jingles and television underscores for an international clientele -- crafting musical identities for clients like Blockbuster Video, Totes, Roundup, Walmart, Lenscrafters, and Pantene. Phil also composed songs and underscores for most of the daytime television dramas. His music is represented by several music libraries and continually heard in broadcast around the world.
Brady Barnett – Performance Analyst
Brady has been an independent producer and engineer in Los Angeles and Nashville since 1996. He runs Of Sound Mind Productions, a full-service production company located south of Nashville, Tennessee. His impressive list of clients includes multi-platinum selling and Grammy-award winning artists such as 'N Sync, Faith Hill, Keith Urban, Brandy, Ozzy Osbourne, Shaquille O'Neal, Bob Seger, Alan Jackson, Brad Paisley, George Jones, George Strait, Reba, Lonestar, Trace Adkins, LeAnn Rimes, Darius Rucker, and Josh Turner.
In addition to his production and engineering work, Brady co-authored the book Multi-Platinum Pro Tools (published worldwide by Focal Press) and is the owner of Multi-Platinum, LLC, which specializes in producing high-end instructional videos featuring award-winning multi-platinum engineers and producers. These videos have been sold in countries all over the world to rave reviews.
Brady is a member of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), the American Federation of Musicians, and is a voting member of the Grammy panel (NARAS). Brady was the recipient of the 2007 MTSU Distinguished Young Alumni Award for his achievements in the music industry and a recent inductee into the MTSU Recording Industry Wall of Fame.
Ives Chor, Ph.D. – Senior Research Engineer
Dr. Chor is a researcher in the areas of expressive musical performance and the cognition of musical structure. He has developed quantitative and computational methods for the analysis of musical rhythm and has presented his work internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in Music Cognition from Northwestern University, a B.M. in Jazz Bass Performance from Cornish College of the Arts, and a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. He was awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at MIT (which he declined) to pursue research on the role of body movement in the perception and comprehension of musical rhythm. Previously, Ives worked as a Program Manager at Microsoft Corporation, where he contributed to the design and development of Microsoft Excel, Windows NT, and interactive television products.
Kevin Hering – Director, Information Technology
Kevin comes from a diverse background in audio engineering, web and computer technology, and music performance. Drawing on his skills as a musician and engineer as well as his experience in the IT industry, Kevin is involved in IT management, studio design and infrastructure, site planning, and other technical systems. Basically, he handles anything with a blinking light (and then some).
Before landing at Zenph, Kevin was a key player at Kitchen Mastering, one of the premier audio mastering facilities in the southeastern United States with clients that include The Avett Brothers, Claudia Quintet, Ani DiFranco, Rosebuds, Zachary Richard, Camper Van Beethoven, Nick Lowe, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Vieux Farka Toure and many more. From network and web design, graphic design, to audio forensics techniques and audio distribution models, Kevin had his hands in almost everything that happened at the Kitchen.
Kevin is a graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He has spent more time wearing headphones than he has spent sleeping.
Dan Heyl – Senior Software Developer
Dan is responsible for leading the team developing the next-generation MIDI editor for Zenph. Prior to joining the team, Dan worked in various positions in software development at several companies, including a start-up, WeatherPredict, later acquired by RenaissanceRe, and an 18-year stint at IBM, where he developed portable communications software across multiple operating systems. Dan has more than 25 years of software development experience including more than six years of management experience at WeatherPredict, where he managed the IT department as it grew from a start-up to part of the global RenRe network.
Eric Hirsh – Coordinator, Research & Development
Eric has been passionate about the intersection of music and technology since childhood, acquiring his first synthesizer and MIDI sequencer at age seven and playing his first professional jazz engagement at age twelve. He has been a key member of the Research and Development team at Zenph since 2006, participating in performance analysis and live show production. Eric led Zenph's initiative to develop re-performance for upright bass and woodwinds, and is now coordinating a larger team in modeling instruments and performer-instrument interaction.
Eric is also an accomplished jazz pianist and composer. He is a four-time recipient of the ASCAP Foundation Young Jazz Composers Award and has been artist-in-residence with the Kennedy Center's prestigious Betty Carter's Jazz Ahead program. Eric currently performs, records, and tours with two bands: The Beast, a progressive hip hop/jazz quartet, and Orquesta GarDel, a 13-member Cuban salsa ensemble.
He holds undergraduate degrees in physics and music from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to which he has subsequently been invited as a classroom speaker on musical acoustics and the use of the arts in science education.
Randal Leistikow, Ph.D. – Senior Software Engineer
Randal Leistikow, senior software engineer and signal processing researcher, earned a Ph.D. in Computer-Based Music Theory and Acoustics at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). His dissertation, "Bayesian Modeling of Musical Expectations via Maximum-Entropy Stochastic Grammars," presents a framework for encoding information about musical structure in the context of dynamic Bayesian signal networks, opening the door to a class of intelligent applications in which audio signal processing accuracy is improved by knowledge of musical tendencies. He has also co-authored publications on IP-based audio distribution, audio analysis-transformation-resynthesis, frequency estimation, and multi-pitch identification.
Dr. Leistikow brings to Zenph several years of professional software engineering experience, honed in small, fast-paced companies promoting individual creativity and accountability. His software and research interests are focused and guided by his life-long love of music, which led him to complete a Bachelor of Music in percussion performance at the Eastman School of Music.
Patrick Litterst – Software Developer
Patrick joined Zenph in April 2010 and is a key member of the software development team that is creating Zenph's next-generation MIDI editor as well as internal production tools. Prior to joining Zenph, Patrick developed innovative music education software for TimeWarp Technologies.
Patrick holds a Master of Music degree in Percussion Performance from The Boston Conservatory where he studied under Keith Aleo, John Grimes, and Nancy Zeltzman. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Science from Vassar College, studying percussion with Frank Cassara. While at Vassar, Patrick was the recipient of the Adams Prize for Excellence in Computer Science and twice won the Vassar College Orchestra's concerto competition. Patrick remains an active musician and has most recently performed with the North Carolina Symphony, the Raleigh Symphony Orchestra, and the Durham Symphony Orchestra.
Stella Sick, D.M.A. – Performance Analyst
Dr. Sick was born in Novosibirsk, Russia where she also received her early music education. Upon coming to the United States, she went on to earn her Bachelor and Masters of Music degrees at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. She continued her studies at the University of Minnesota, completing her DMA in 2003.
A pioneer in the field of long distance piano performance and instruction, Stella has taught students in various parts of the United States using long distance MIDI connectivity technology in conjunction with video conferencing. She has performed long distance as well.
An active solo and chamber performer, Stella is an adjunct professor at Hamline University where she teaches music history and piano. She has been a Managing Director of the Minnesota International Piano-e-Competition since June 2004. A frequent presenter at major conferences, her work has been presented at The College Music Society, Music Teachers National Association, and the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy. In 2009, she was also a contributor to Clavier Companion, a magazine for piano teaching.
Harvey Thornburg, Ph.D. – Senior Research Engineer
Dr. Thornburg is a pioneer and leading expert in the application of dynamic probabilistic models to musical audio signal processing and computational human activity analysis. He studied under Dr. Julius O. Smith III at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University, and obtained a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2005. There he developed robust methods for musical audio segmentation and transcription that systematically incorporate prior knowledge from musical structure.
More recently he has been faculty in the school of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University where he worked on mixed-reality multimedia systems and human-computer interaction frameworks. There he specialized in full-body human movement analysis and computational auditory scene analysis with application to virtual learning environments, decision simulation environments and interactive dance performance. Harvey's research has been supported by several National Science Foundation grants and featured in numerous high-profile venues including ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM Multimedia, and IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing.