Willie Payne
Assistant Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill
Interests
Creative Expression • Accessibility • CS Ed
Comics • Coffee • Running • New Music • New Fiction
Reach Me
william [dot] payne [at] unc [dot] edu
Chapel Hill, NC
About Willie
I study how technology can support creativity and open pathways for individuals to express themselves on their own terms. To this end, I use participatory methods. I work closely with collaborators throughout design and deploy novel systems in their environments. Some results:
- FiLOrk - Blind youth live coding electronic music!
- danceON - Teen girls making animations that respond to dance!
- Cyclops - Improvising music with eye input!
My articles are published mainly at HCI (Human Computer Interaction) conferences including ASSETS (Computers and Accessibility), Creativity & Cognition, and NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression).
I graduated in 2023 with a PhD in Music Technology at NYU where I was advised by Amy Hurst, and mentored by Yoav Bergner, Kayla DesPortes, and R. Luke DuBois. Before that, I earned a BS/MS in Computer Science and a BM in Music Composition from CU Boulder, where I studied with Shaun Kane, Clayton Lewis, and Michael Theodore.
Selected Projects
FiLOrk
SoundCells
danceON
Collaborators
Links
Cyclops
Single-Input Instruments
Links
TinkaMOD
BiSoN
Electromagnetic Dulcimer
Guitar Processor
Links
Publications
Mentorship is important to me. Undergraduate research assistants are marked with † while Masters students I mentored for thesis credit are marked with ‡.