Hello! I’m Phivos-Angelos Kollias, a Berlin-based music composer, interactive sound designer, and researcher-technologist (PhD, Interactive Music Composition).
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I specialize in dynamic, adaptive scores and immersive sonic environments for video games and VR. With over a decade of experience, I merge artistic innovation with technical expertise. My classical training and tech proficiency enable me to compose original music, design interactive audio systems, and integrate sound into game engines (Unity). I often leverage AI and interactive electronics for deeply responsive soundscapes.
I have a strong record of collaborations with clients like Honig Studios (El Hijo - Apple TV Game of Year; The Lost Glitches), Dell Computers (CinemaSound Orchestra), and cultural institutions (ZKM Karlsruhe, Greek National Opera). My VR work includes the award-winning Symphony of Noise, The Fall (in dev), and Place VR. My multi-award-winning work, featured at global events (BFI London, Ars Electronica), shows my commitment to impactful audio.
Selected Projects
Games & VR
The Fall - VR Game (2025 in dev)
The Lost Glitches - Video Game (2025)
Place - VR Installation (2022)
Symphony of Noise - Music VR Installation (2020, 1st Prize FIVARS)
El Hijo - Video Game (2019, Apple TV Game of Year 2022/Gamecon Indie Award)
Other Interactive Works
Echorroes - AI Music for Kids (Finalist NBG Seeds 2024, Nom. S+T+ARTS 2025; 2022-Pres)
VOICES - Interactive AV Installation (Ars Electronica, IMPAKT 2023)
Nostophiliac AI - AI AV Experience (3rd Prize Musicworks 2023)
Captured - Interactive Cinema (BFI London 2021)
Milli - Interactive Music App (Red Dot, GIGA Maus; 2014)
Qualifications and Key Education
PhD in Interactive Music - Université Paris 8 (2010–2017)
Composition Degree (DEM) - Conservatoire de Boulogne, Paris (2010–2013)
Master in Computer Assisted Composition - Université Paris 8 (2006–2007)
Master in Instrumental Composition - City University, London (2003–2004)
Bachelor in Music - Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge (2000–2003)
Awards & Distinctions Highlights
Nominated - S+T+ARTS Prize 2025 (for Echorroes)
3rd Prize - Iannis Xenakis Int. Electronic Music Comp. (Greece, 2025)
Finalist - Onassis ONX Immersive Comp. (2024, Doppelganger)
Shortlisted - NGB Seeds Innovation Comp. (2024, Echorroes)
3rd Prize - Musicworks Electronic Music Contest (Toronto, 2023, Nostophiliac AI)
1st Prize - Excellence in Sound Design, FIVARS (Toronto, 2020, Symphony of Noise)
Plus multiple other international awards, nominations & finalist positions (2004-Present).Experience Level
Language
Work Experience
Education
Qualifications
Industry Experience
The Lost Glitches is a digital card game set in a virtual world built from merged collective memories. I composed and produced all music for the games levels and its first promotional trailer, working closely with Honig Studios game designers and producers.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2782830/The_Lost_Glitches/
Key responsibilities:
Composed original thematic tracks for each of the five game levels, aligning music with gameplay pacing and narrative structure
Created and delivered full stems, loopable versions and adaptive-layered audio assets for in-engine implementation
Produced and mixed the music for the promotional trailer, ensuring cohesion with in-game themes
Collaborated with game designers and audio engineers to define interactive triggers and transitions
Managed asset delivery, revisions and milestone reviews to stay on schedule
Trailer
Introduction Music
Level 1
Level 7
- El Hijo is a non-violent stealth game in which the player guides a six-year-old boy on a quest to find his mother, set against a Spaghetti Western backdrop inspired by Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone.
- I composed and arrranged an interactive orchestral score that dynamically adapts to the player’s movements and the game’s environments—monastery, desert and town—creating a musical dialogue with the classic Western genre to support the unfolding narrative
- In addition, I created the music for four cut scenes, crafting distinct thematic material to enhance key story moments.
- Designed and composed thematic orchestral stems that respond to spatial triggers and player actions
- Mapped interactive audio states to in-game events (e.g., slide guitar for an angry monk, string trio for an approaching cowboy)
- Created adaptive stems and loops for seamless transitions between exploration, tension and discovery
- Defined orchestration cues tied to environmental contexts (cart ride punctuated by timpani and double bass; low brass for dark areas)
- Wrote detailed implementation notes and collaborated with programmer Stephan Schüritz to integrate the system in Unity
- Composed original scores for four cut scenes, developing unique motifs and instrumentation choices and arranged the orchestra.
- Apple TV Game of the Year, App Store Awards
- Best Indie Game, The Mix Gamescom Indie Village Selects
- Deutscher Computerspielpreis – Best Family Game
- Kinder Medien Festival Goldener Spatz – Digital jury award for Gute Geschichten – Digital erzählt
- Pädagogischer Medienpreis – Offerings for Children
EL HIJO
Client: Honig Studios (developer) / HandyGames (publisher)
Project overview:
More information about the dynamic music score here:
Key responsibilities:
AWARDS
- Client: DELL Computers
- Event/Platform: IFA Berlin International Exhibition
- My Role: Composer & Interactive Music System Designer
- Original Composition & Sound Design: Composed an original musical piece specifically structured for an interactive, spatially distributed 10-computer orchestra. Each computer “instrument” had its own part, contributing to a cohesive and dynamic orchestral soundscape.
- Interactive Music System Design: Designed and developed the core interactive system that translated conductor’s hand gestures (captured by a Leap Motion sensor) into real-time musical control. This involved mapping gestures to musical parameters such as tempo, dynamics, and triggering specific sections or instrumental layers.
- Spatial Audio Arrangement: Strategically arranged the audio output across the ten computers to simulate the spatial experience of a live orchestra, enhancing the immersive quality of the installation.
- Integration with Visuals: Collaborated to ensure the accompanying visualizations dynamically responded to the music and the conductor’s actions, creating a multi-sensory experience.
- Technical Implementation & On-site Setup: Oversaw the technical setup and calibration of the audio and interactive elements at the IFA exhibition to ensure a seamless user experience.
Project Overview
For the IFA Berlin International Exhibition, I was commissioned by DELL Computers to create “CinemaSound Orchestra,” a unique interactive music installation. The installation featured ten DELL computers arranged like a classical orchestra, allowing visitors to step into the role of a conductor. Using hand gestures, participants could lead this digital ensemble in real-time, experiencing a novel way to interact with and create music. The installation aimed to showcase the power and creative potential of DELL’s technology through an engaging and artistic experience.
Key Responsibilities & Contributions
- Producers/Commissioners: Fantomatico, High Road Stories
- Showcased At:
- BFI London Film Festival (Expanded Section, 2021) - Premiere
- Silbersalz – International Science & Media Festival (Halle, Germany, 2021)
- CPH:DOX (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022)
- My Role: Interactive Music Composer/Designer
- Adaptive Score Composition: Composed an original, highly adaptive musical score that dynamically responded to the actions, emotional states, and collective behavior of the participants’ avatars within the virtual environment.
- Sonic Identity for Avatars: Designed unique sonic identities for the avatars. In peaceful states, each avatar was associated with its own distinct piano resonance. Collectively, these resonances formed an evolving, immersive “wall of sound,” reflecting the shared virtual space.
- Music for Emergent Crowd Behavior: Developed specific musical vocabularies to represent different states of crowd behavior.
- Peaceful/Neutral States: Characterized by the aforementioned individual and collective piano resonances, creating an atmospheric and subtly shifting soundscape.
- Tension/Conflict States: Depicted through more frantic and intense musical gestures performed by a small virtual ensemble (including piano clusters, dynamic drum rolls, cymbal hits, and impactful bass drum kicks). These musical elements were directly interconnected with and triggered by the avatars’ gestures and the overall intensity of the simulation.
- Real-time Music System Integration: Worked closely with the development team to integrate the interactive music system, ensuring seamless and meaningful connections between the visual simulation and the auditory experience.
- Sound Design Elements: Contributed to the overall sound design, ensuring the music complemented other environmental sounds and interactions within the virtual world.
Project Overview
“Captured” is an innovative participatory installation where individuals step into a virtual world as digital doubles of themselves. Participants’ faces are scanned, creating new identities within a collective virtual scenario that models the unpredictable and emergent moods of human crowd behavior. They become both actors and spectators in a narrative simulation, exploring themes of identity, agency, and collective dynamics in digital spaces.
Key Responsibilities & Contributions in Music & Sound
- Producers/Client: High Road Stories (Mike Robbins & Harmke Heezen)
- Showcased At: BFI London Film Festival (Expanded Section, 2020) - Premiere
- Year: 2020
- My Role: Interactive Music Composer & System Designer
- Interactive Score Composition: Created an original interactive music score using electro-acoustic music tools and custom coding, primarily in Max/MSP.
- Conceptual Sound Design based on “Mapping”: The core musical idea revolved around various forms of “mapping.” This included:
- Reinterpreting scientific processes that map electromagnetic spectra (like the sun’s radiation or atmospheric disturbances) to audible sound.
- Transforming “found musical objects” – such as decades-old electronic music pieces – by remapping and recomposing them into new sonic forms that still hinted at their origins.
- Translating motion capture data from a dancer into musical gestures and visual elements within the VR space.
- Interconnection of Sound and Vision: Ensured that user actions and interactions within the VR environment had equally apparent visual and sonic consequences, creating a cohesive and reactive experience.
- Max/MSP Programming: Developed the underlying interactive music system and logic using Max/MSP to control the adaptive score and its response to user input and pre-determined data streams.
- Max/MSP (for interactive music system development)
- Electro-acoustic music composition tools
- Virtual Reality (VR) development platform
- Motion capture data
Project Overview
“Proper Motion VR” is an immersive music virtual reality installation inspired by the ever-changing images and sounds of the night sky. In this experience, sound and vision are deeply interconnected, forming a unified whole where human gestures translate into musical expressions. The piece explores the human desire to find meaning in the patterns of the universe, using layers of remapped data—from astronomical phenomena to archived electronic music and motion-captured dance—to create a unique sensory journey.
Key Responsibilities & Contributions in Music & Sound
Technologies Used
- Director: Michaela Pňačeková
- My Role: Conceptual Sound Design, Interactive Music Composer & System Developer
- Key Awards & Recognition:
- Award of Excellence in Sound Design - FIVARS (Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories), 2020
- Top XR Installations of 2019 - Forbes
- Nominated - Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction, IDFA
- Nominated - VR NOW Awards
- Showcased At (Selected): FIVARS, IDFA, Reeperbahn Festival, VRHAM!, VR NOW Festival, and many others.
- Year: 2019-2020
Award-Winning Sound Design: My work on this project was recognized with the Award of Excellence in Sound Design at FIVARS 2020.
Max/MSP (for core interactive audio processing, sound manipulation logic, and NUI sound analysis)
Unity3D (game engine for VR development and visual representation)
Microphone input (for voice, breath, and other bodily sound interaction)
Sound analysis and feature extraction techniques (conceptualized with machine learning approaches)
Optional foot trackers (used at some festival events for enhanced immersion)
Project Overview & Concept
“A Symphony of Noise” is an interactive music VR experience inviting users to explore a fantastic world made of and governed by sound. Loosely based on Matthew Herbert’s book “The Music,” the project challenges conventional understanding of music. The soundscape is crafted from everyday noises, transformed through mixing, superimposition, and modulation, creating a personal auditory journey.
The core concept, envisioned a world where objects and surfaces are made of a flexible ‘sonic-clay’—composed of countless sound frequencies—plastic to the user’s touch and responsive to their uttered or bodily sounds. Complex soundscapes visually manifest, sometimes resembling 3D spectrograms, allowing users to navigate and alter the very fabric of sound.
Users embark on a voyage through inner and outer dimensions—from the first heartbeat to the sounds of nature, the man-made world, and the supernatural, all while interacting through an intuitive, natural interface.
- Producers/Client: High Road Stories (Mike Robbins & Harmke Heezen)
- Showcased At:
- DOK Leipzig (Prototype)
- Docaviv Film Festival (Prototype)
- Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Exhibited since late 2022 - Present)
- Year: 2022-Present
- My Role: Interactive Sound Designer
- Immersive Soundscape Creation: My primary goal was to recreate the authentic atmosphere and feeling of being present within the Great Synagogue of Aleppo. This involved crafting a soundscape that was both historically evocative and sensorially engaging.
- Integration of Archival and Contemporary Audio: I sourced and integrated archival sounds related to Aleppo and its soundscape, blending them with contemporary recordings and originally designed audio elements. This fusion aimed to transport the listener back in time and connect them with the environment of the historic Synagogue.
- Sound Design for VR Interaction: Ensured that the sound design responded appropriately to user interaction within the VR environment, contributing to a cohesive and believable experience.
Project Overview
“Place VR” is an immersive virtual reality experience that digitally reconstructs and revives the historic Great Synagogue of Aleppo. The project allows participants to explore this significant cultural heritage site, engaging with its digital walls and the collective memories it holds. It’s conceived as an “archaeological reconstruction with the senses,” aiming to provide a profound connection to the place and its history.
Key Responsibilities & Contributions in Sound
- Exhibit of the Day, Communication Arts (USA) – April 2014
- Mobile of the Day, Favourite Website Awards – April 2015
- Red Dot Award (Germany) – August 2015
- GIGA Maus Award (Germany) for artwork, story and music – October 2015
- Pädi Award, Educational Interactive Prize – November 2015
- Power to the Pixel, Best Kids Concept Award (UK) – 2013 ([Kollias Interactive Composition |][1])
Project type: Interactive children’s storybook app & accompanying web book
Setting: Apple-Tree Hill
Narrative: Follows Milli, a curious snail, through four chapters that introduce preschoolers to Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism via interactive landscapes, animations and poetic storytelling.
Technology: Combines hand-drawn illustration with web-based interactivity; features a custom adaptive audio environment that responds to each tap and swipe.
Role: Adaptive music and sound design by Phivos-Angelos Kollias, creating an audio world that mirrors and enhances the visual and narrative elements.
Awards for “Milli”
(as part of the interactive project “Milli Meets the Arts”)
Explore the project:
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