Fredrik Gran is a Stockholm-based composer and researcher working at the intersection of acoustic music, electroacoustic composition, robotics, and performance. His practice explores non-human performers, mechanical musicianship, and sound as a scenographic and embodied phenomenon.
Gran’s music and research investigate the musical potential of mechanical and robotic processes, combining acoustic instruments, amplified objects, live electronics, and custom-built robotic systems. His work extends instrumental technique through mechanical mediation, computer-assisted transcription, and purpose-made electronic models, integrating electroacoustic thinking into orchestral, chamber, vocal, and installation-based contexts. Underlying this practice is an obsessive attention to sound itself — its materiality, detail, and the continual search for new sonic possibilities.
A central strand of his work is long-term research into robotic instrumental performance. Since 2009, Gran has explored robotic playing techniques for the cello, culminating in the development of the robot cellist — a non-human performer consisting of two industrial robotic arms playing a cello. Through composition and research, this work examines the idiomatic, anthropomorphic, and scenographic implications of robotic musicianship, as well as its consequences for musical form, gesture, and perception. In 2024, the robot cellist appeared as a soloist with the Malmö Symphony Orchestra.
Gran’s music has been performed internationally at festivals including ISCM World New Music Days, Warsaw Autumn, and Nordic Music Days, as well as at concert venues across Europe, North America, and Asia, and by leading orchestral and chamber ensembles. His work has also been presented in large-scale immersive and cross-disciplinary contexts, including twelve performances at Sphere, Las Vegas, as part of Anyma – The End of Genesys, and an ongoing robot cellist installation at Mercer Labs in New York.
Work featured by CNN, BBC, Reuters, Sky News, CBC, SVT, ARTE, Deutsche Welle, The Strad, and WIRED.
Gran has received awards including First Prize at the London Music Society International Composers Competition, First Prize at the Eleanor Stubley Recording Award, First Prize at the Codes d’Accès Composers Competition, and has been a finalist at GRAME. His research has also been recognized with a CIRMMT Research Award.
He holds degrees in composition from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and is pursuing doctoral research at McGill University in Montréal, affiliated with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT).
