Helen Spencer-Wallace

Helen Spencer-Wallace is an artist, creative coder, electronic musician, vocalist, and somatic educator based in Portland, Oregon. They make works of sonic and personal presence. They work in installation and performance, often both at once. They mess with inconsistent and multiple selves, explicit deception, and being a scary beautiful digital choir. Their solo work centers on extended vocal technique and nonlinear song manipulation. Most of their work these days uses presence sensors in concert with digital and traditional methods of composition. Their teaching practice focuses on creating new curriculums that increase access to music and digital arts technology, particularly in creative coding and analog modular synthesis. Helen is particularly interested in how emotional, energetic, and somatic rapport affect the accessibility of learning in fields that are systematically exclusive to people of certain classes and identifications. They also particularly enjoy teaching and developing curriculum for classes that contain students with diverse experience levels in the subject area. They teach creative coding and analog modular synthesis at Portland Community College and through whateverSpace/SLP, and have taught students from all over the world, of many walks of life, and from ages 8-60.