Caroline Louise Miller is a composer and intermedia artist based in Portland, Oregon. Her music broadly explores affect, ecology, labor politics, tactility, and digital materiality, often addressing contemporary issues within dreamlike musical spaces that thread shimmering textures and romantic melodic lines through harsh noise and clattering dissonance. She appears at a diverse array of festivals and venues with works ranging from electroacoustic music, pop crossover, and sound art to chamber music and musical theater.
Caroline has most recently received grants and commissions from Chamber Music America, the Matt Marks Impact Fund, Alarm Will Sound, Guerilla Opera, Transient Canvas, Ensemble Adapter (Berlin, Germany), SPLICE Ensemble, Kallisti Ensemble, and SPOR Festival of Contemporary Music & Sound Art (Aarhus, Denmark). She received first prize in the International Society of Bassists/David Walter Composition Competition for her piece Hydra Nightingale, a collaboration with free jazz bassist and improvisor Kyle Motl. Her work “Subsong” is on Music from SEAMUS, Vol. 28. She served as an artist-in-residence aboard a Scripps Institution of Oceanography research vessel in the South Pacific, collaborating with filmmaker Lyndsay Bloom to produce a feature-length experimental documentary: SEA SOAR. As a performer of electronics, Caroline has played with trumpeter Alexandria Smith at The Stone at the New School, with duo tik-tok at Darmstadt Summer Festival for New Music, and with trumpeter Sam Wells at Electroacoustic Barn Dance.
In 2021, Caroline is serving as a lead researcher for Sonic Matter / The Witness, an interdisciplinary, transterritorial music festival that investigates sustainable development and the impacts of the anthropocene. Her project involves collaborators from across the U.S., including PSU SAMP Students. The music that comes out of this research will be presented in Zurich, Switzerland at the conclusion of 2021. Caroline's work is regularly performed at festivals and venues across the U.S. and around the world.
Alongside individual projects, Caroline is passionate about organizing, curating, and producing concerts. From 2012–2017, she organized annual freeform concerts at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Immersion@Birch Aquarium drew over a thousand visitors from the San Diego county community since its inaugural event, and incorporated musics as diverse as experimental chamber, gamelan, American folk, soul, free jazz, drone, and noise; as well as installation, algorithmic art, film, and poetry. For her curatorial and community-building work, she won the Carolyn Applebaum Endowed Prize. Additionally, she curated a multimedia science-fiction show called Tales from the Wasteland that brought together works which meditate on alternate realities; pasts, presents, and futures. Since 2014, she has also co-organized and co-curated, with Fernanda Navarro (and many others over the years) a series of concerts and installations centering the perspectives and experiences of women.
Caroline holds a Ph.D. and Master of Arts in music composition from UC San Diego, and a Bachelor of Music from UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance.