Margaret Kogos is a composer, sound designer, and music technologist originally from New Orleans and based in Brooklyn, New York. Much of her music is focused on story-telling. She seeks to immerse the listener in her stories through the use of unique textures, often a mix of acoustic instruments, field recordings, song lyrics or text excerpts. She frequently uses electronics in her works, but maintains an organic sound through the use of live processing of acoustic sounds and pre-recorded found sounds. Lately she has been focusing on how to better utilize form to convey a coherent and compelling story arc within her works.

As a composer, Margaret has attended numerous festivals including Banff's Evolution Quartet, the Yarn/Wire festival, the Line Upon Line Winter Composer festival, SPLICE festival, and the So Percussion Summer Institute at Princeton University, where she attended as an ASCAP Composer’s Fellow. In the summer of 2021, she will be attending Evolution: Quartet at the Banff Center of the Arts where she will premiere a new work for string quartet. Her works have been performed at various venues throughout the United States and the Czech Republic.

Margaret is a recent graduate with a Master’s in Media Arts from the Performing Arts Department at the University of Michigan. Her thesis research focused on soundwalking and soundscape composition, real-time sound design, and auditory augmentation. She designed and built a system in C++ that modifies the user’s current soundscape according to environmental sensor data such as temperature, humidity, and ambient light. The resulting sound effects are low latency and highly localized at the physical sound source, encouraging environmental exploration and experimental soundmaking.

She currently holds the position of Creative Engineer at Sets & Effects design and fabrication studio, where she designs and implements integrated technology systems for custom sets. She formerly served as the Assistant Publicist at New Music PR firm Dotdotdotmusic, and as Artist Liason at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Margaret holds a B.M in Music Theory and Composition from New York University, where she studied with Marc-Antonio Consoli.

When she is not playing, writing or listening to music, she is probably eating, sleeping, reading or traveling. Or maybe at the park, enjoying the sunshine.