# Dylan Cantor

> Dylan Cantor is a software engineer who builds real-time and collaborative music systems. He is a double major in Computer Science (CAS) and Music Technology (B.M., Steinhardt) at New York University (NYU), with a minor in Mathematics, graduating May 2027. He works on Gil Weinberg's research team at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, where he builds the iOS client for HearMe; studied spatial audio at IRCAM, Paris in spring 2026 through NYU's program there; and cofounded Clubs, a creative collaboration app live on the App Store. Based in Brooklyn, New York.

- Interests: real-time audio DSP, on-device inference, spatial audio, music information retrieval, interactive performance systems.
- Coursework: digital signal processing, operating systems, probability and statistics, artificial intelligence, analog and digital electronics, basic algorithms, electronic music synthesis, Max/MSP.
- Award: Winner, Audiotool Challenge, Google DeepMind Magenta Hackathon (June 2026), for Jamarama.
- Press: [NYU student-founders talk app-based solution to creative collaboration](https://nyunews.com/culture/2026/11/05/clubs-app-student-founders/), Washington Square News, 5 November 2026 (about Clubs, with Nick Benak).
- Contact: cantor.dylan@gmail.com

## Work

- [HearMe](https://dylancantor.com/hearme): iOS app from the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology (Prof. Gil Weinberg's group). A musician records something, plays the on-screen keyboard, or types lyrics, and a generative model builds an arrangement around that performance rather than a text prompt. Stems come back separate, with a chord track and time-aligned lyrics on one timeline, plus a play-along mode. Dylan is the sole engineer on the iOS client (React Native, sample-accurate audio scheduling, background generation watcher, per-project version history), 2026 to present. [App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hearme-music/id6812032477) · [CMT project page](https://cmt.music.gatech.edu/hearmi/)
- [Clubs](https://dylancantor.com/clubs): A platform for finding people to make things with. Projects are posted as cards, discovered by swiping, and applied to; accepted collaborators work in real-time channels. Matching and semantic search run on models that read what people write about themselves. Dylan is cofounder and sole engineer (React Native, Expo, TypeScript, Supabase); cofounder Nick Benak leads design and marketing. 2,066 people, 326 live projects, 225 creators across 49 schools (as stated on the site). [clubsapp.org](https://clubsapp.org) · [App Store](https://apps.apple.com/app/clubs-start-creating/id6761756814)
- [Jamarama](https://dylancantor.com/jamarama): Real-time multiplayer jam system built with Sai Nellutla. Two to four players each control drums, harmony, lead, or crowd energy of one track from their phones. A master clock in the host browser fans beats to phones over WebSocket; a deterministic clock-locked band is wrapped in an off-grid texture layer generated by Magenta RealTime 2 on-device via MLX at about 2.37x real time. Winner, Audiotool Challenge, Google DeepMind Magenta Hackathon (Music Hack Space hackathon at Berklee), June 2026. Dylan built the audio architecture and the jam system. [Live demo](https://jamarama.dylancantor.com)
- ["I Feel Like"](https://dylancantor.com/ifeellike): 4:13 spatial audio piece made at IRCAM, Paris in spring 2026. About forty sources encoded into a second-order ambisonic field, decoded to the 3D speaker layout in IRCAM's Studio D, to binaural, and to stereo. Sources recorded at the Ateliers Baschet and in the Bois de Vincennes; produced in Ableton Live, spatialized in Reaper with the IEM Plug-in Suite. [Project paper (PDF)](https://dylancantor.com/Cantor_I-Feel-Like_IRCAM.pdf)
- [Euler](https://dylancantor.com/euler/): "Euler: Musical Paths", an iPhone app that turns a walk into music, designed and engineered solo in 2026; live on the App Store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/euler-musical-paths/id6832371282). A walk is a graph of stops, each with a musical style; a Python conductor filters GPS, snaps it to the nearest path with hysteresis and heading, and a field function turns position into weights over the styles, rate-limited by walking speed. The weights steer Magenta RealTime 2 (Google DeepMind; mrt2_small via the community PyTorch port), which runs on a cloud GPU and streams 48 kHz stereo back over a WebSocket; pre-rendered loops of the same styles play when offline. Walks can be drawn on a map and shared as self-contained links that carry the walk's shape, not its location, unless pinned. Location is sent in real time to steer the music and not stored. React Native, Expo, TypeScript, Python. [Privacy policy](https://dylancantor.com/euler/privacy/)
- [Biophony](https://dylancantor.com/biophony/): "Biophony: Bug Chorus", an iPhone AR spatial-audio instrument, designed and engineered solo in 2026; live on the App Store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/biophony-bug-chorus/id6832371418). Creatures placed on the floor (bullfrog, green frog, dog-day cicada, true katydid, tree cricket, field cricket) are oscillators coupled through phase-response curves, with 1/r^2 spatial coupling and propagation delay, so each species falls into synchrony or alternation and calls travel as waves; the Kuramoto order parameter r is shown live. Each creature is rendered binaurally in the app (not with Apple's spatializer) using measured MIT KEMAR HRIRs and a fractional-delay ITD, with the phone's pose from ARKit. Voices are modal syntheses built from measurements of iNaturalist field recordings and morph continuously into instruments (bullfrog to bass, green frog to plucked bass, field cricket to glockenspiel, tree cricket to flute, katydid to pizzicato, cicada to bowed drone). An integration of published techniques; it makes no new scientific claim. Swift, ARKit, AVAudioEngine, Accelerate. [Privacy policy](https://dylancantor.com/biophony/privacy/)
- [Clockworks](https://dylancantor.com/clockworks): "Clockworks: Easy Polyrhythms", an iOS app for writing polyrhythms, designed and engineered solo in 2026. Each ring is a clock at its own subdivision against one tempo; patterns export as MIDI. React Native with a native audio engine (24-voice pool), Skia rendering, Reanimated. [App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clockworks-easy-polyrhythms/id6780532729)

## Music

- [Growing](https://dylancantor.com/growing-sqime): Character-based music project with Miller Fishback, moving between rap, jazz-rock and electronic music: the trio of Ozstriker, Golden Joe and Finch, then Whippet, an avant-garde experimental jazz-rock fusion jam band from Philadelphia (founded by Lord Whippet in September 2022, led by Fritz Rango and Bruner). Dylan's role: guitar, modular synthesizer, production, engineering and mixing.
- [Close Quarters](https://dylancantor.com/close-quarters): Band with Nick Benak. Album *EDUCATION* is a psychedelic rock concept album about going through school at NYU; streams in full on the site. [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/artist/4qhQLFoaOepWbxyHKl7WFk)

## Optional

- [CV (PDF)](https://dylancantor.com/Cantor_Dylan_CV.pdf)
- [Sitemap](https://dylancantor.com/sitemap.xml)