Massimiliano Cerioni is an Italian composer, sound engineer, artist, and PhD researcher at Orpheus Instituut. His practice spans composition, performance with custom systems and didgeridoos, video art, installations, electronic lutherie, creative coding, and audio software design with the project Culto. Musically, his aesthetic sits at the intersection of electroacoustic, ambient, dark ambient, noise, and drone. He also performs doom-drone/metal under the alias Granitaur. Collaborative projects extending beyond sound and music also represent an important part of his artistic production.
He studied Electronic Music with Michelangelo Lupone at the Alfredo Casella Conservatory of Music in L'Aquila, Italy, completing his Bachelor's and Master's in 2010 and 2016, both with honors. He interned at INA-GRM in Paris in 2009 and at GMEM in Marseille in 2012. In 2014 and 2015 he received two commissions from CRM of Rome. In 2015, he won First Prize at the National Arts Prize "Claudio Abbado" for electroacoustic music composition. In 2019, he held an artistic residency at EMS in Stockholm, supported by the ICC "C.M. Lerici". He moved to Berlin in 2021, where he undertook a residency at SCOPE BLN and co-founded the collective Wasch, presenting performances, exhibitions, and solo shows. In 2023, he joined Radius Collective, a US-based group of artists and designers that exhibits internationally. His works have been presented at venues and festivals including Berlin's CTM, ICMC Athens, Tempo Reale (Florence), Artescienza (Rome), Goethe-Institut Rom, Kunsttage Basel, Santa Cecilia Conservatory of Rome, and Rome Fine Arts Academy, among others. His music is released through Cyclical Dreams (Argentina) and Elli Records (France).
As an educator, he has taught Music Technology and Sound Design at public and private schools in Rome and Berlin. Building on two decades of work with the software Max, he taught programming for the online educational platform Music Hackspace in 2022. At the end of that year, he received a commission from Cycling'74 for a Max patch released on their blog. In 2024, he became a Max Certified Trainer, and in 2025 he co-founded the Max Berlin Network, dedicated to promoting the work of artists and creatives who use Max in Berlin, and to encouraging its practice among participants. In the same year, he brought his expertise with sound, programming, and AI to the Enacting Artistic Research project, in which, as a freelance researcher, he co-developed a system that uses AI to assess and describe perceptual qualities of sound. The results have been presented at the SAR Conference (Porto), the Web Audio Conference at IRCAM (Paris), Orpheus Instituut (Ghent), the Pacesetters EU meeting (Málaga), and the European Researchers' Night (Rome).
As a PhD candidate in the docARTES programme at Orpheus Instituut, Cerioni is developing his doctoral research within the ERC project Posthuman Music and the MetamusicX research cluster, both led by Paulo de Assis. His project looks at how the combined actions and decisions of humans, sonic feedback, and artificial intelligence can cause musical form to emerge from this shared field of interaction.
