Composer, performer, researcher, philoso¬pher. “An ingenious inventor of musical automatons, unconditional musical progres¬sive thinker, constantly implicated in the never-ending battle to free music from the clutches of the elite.” (Rudy Tambuyser)

Godfried-Willem Raes (1952, Ghent) is known worldwide as one of the most original experimental music makers in the broadest sense. Not only does he compose, but also he builds his own instruments, including music robots as well as the tetrahedron-shaped concert hall for the Ghent based Logos Foundation. He is an expert designer of electronic hardware as well as software, a welder and metalworker, as well as a specialist in the area of sonar and radar technologies applied to human interfacing in musical contexts. As a stage performer he is a most acclaimed improviser as well as a dancer. He holds a doctorate from Ghent State university. He was formally trained as a composer, a musicologist and a philosopher. He is the founder of the Logos Foundation (1968) and professor of composition at the Ghent University Association. As a full-time researcher he focusses on musical robotics -the outcome of which became his overwhelming M&M robot orchestra, as well as on human interfacing (gesture control and sensing). His work has been presented and performed all over the world.

Biography

Godfried-Willem Raes, born in Gent (Europe) January 3th 1952, is known worldwide as a 'music maker' in the largest sense of the word: as a concert-organizer he's been responsible from 1973 until 1988 for the new-music concert programming of the Philharmonic Society at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, in addition to which he also organized and still organizes all the concerts which take place at the Logos Foundation in Gent, in total about 150 international new music concerts a year. Over a timespan of over 50 years he turned the Logos Foundation into the most innovative new music organization in Flanders. As a composer/performer and instrumentmaker he is the founder of the Logos- Group (1968), out of which grew the Logos Duo, with Moniek Darge as well as the well known experimental Logos Robot orchestra , operating with his 70 spectacular musical robots.
Godfried-Willem Raes studied musicology and philosophy at the Ghent State University as well as piano, clarinet, percussion and composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music of Gent.
He has also published a great number of critical essays and articles in specialized publications. In 1982 he received the Louis Paul Boon Award for the social engagement in his artistic work. In 1988 he became a professor of music composition at the Ghent Royal Conservatory. In 1997 he also became a professor at the Orpheus Higher Institute for Music, a commitment he held, up to 2009. In 1990 he designed and constructed a tetrahedron-shaped concert-hall for the Logos Foundation in Ghent, a project for which it received the Tech-Art prize 1990.
Next to his reputation as a composer, he is also a well known expert in computer technology, robotics and interactive electronic art. He holds a doctors degree from Ghent State University on the basis of his dissertation on the technology of virtual instruments of his design and invention. He is the author of an extensive real time algorithmic music composition programming language: <GMT> running on the Wintel platform.
He was a full time research and composition professor at the Ghent University Association, School of Arts, until his retirement in 2014, but he is still active in the research group of systematic musicology at the Ghent University.
He is currently the honorary president of the Logos Foundation and guest-director of the Logos Robot orchestra as well as Associate Researcher at the Orpheus Research Centre in Music. (OrCIM).