Brian Baumbusch (b. 1987) is an American composer, instrument designer, and inventor whose work has pioneered new approaches to tuning, musical time, cross-cultural collaboration, and interactive music technology. He is the founder and CEO of Holography, an interactive music platform built around his patented multichannel audio and video technology, which transforms recorded performances into interactive, spatially navigable musical experiences. His compositions have been described by The New York Times as “harmonically vivid” and by The Washington Post as “exuberantly complex, maddeningly beautiful, and as intoxicating as a drug.”
Drawing on Balinese gamelan and American experimental music, Baumbusch designed and built two complete sets of American gamelan instruments, founding the Lightbulb Ensemble to develop an original repertoire for them. Following a decade of international performances, he became the first foreign composer to ship and donate two complete American gamelan ensembles to Bali, where they remain in use by the contemporary Balinese ensemble Nata Swara. Their recordings of Prisms for Gene Davis and Hydrogen(2)Oxygen, with the JACK Quartet, appear on the 2023 New World Records album Chemistry for Gamelan and String Quartet.
His compositions have been featured at the Smithsonian Institution, Bali Arts Festival, Bayerischer Rundfunk, and Other Minds Festival. Major works include The Pressure, a 90-minute multimedia “horrortorio”; Isotropes, created through 1000's of remotely recorded performances during the COVID-19 pandemic; and Polytempo Music, commissioned by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and released as a first-of-its-kind interactive album.
Building on his pioneering research in polytempo composition and spatial audio, Baumbusch invented and patented a groundbreaking multichannel interactive music technology and founded Holography, a platform that transforms conventional audio and video recordings into immersive, spatially navigable musical experiences. Allowing audiences to move freely among performers and experience music from dynamically changing perspectives, Holography was featured in the 2025 SXSW Innovation Awards Showcase and has produced interactive recordings with Sandbox Percussion, the Gesualdo Six, The New School, The Fisk Jubilee Singers, Cal State Fullerton and Daedelus.
His work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Gerbode Foundation, Haas Fund, and New Music USA.