micro/Maker by Loose Leaf Transmissions

Dropped into grad school at the University of South Florida, Tyler Kline realized he’d been composing under a rock. He recounts an overwhelming first semester of unraveling old habits, absorbing new ideas from composers like Stuart Saunders Smith, and even delivering a commission that backfired—before a “poop-in-a-group” moment launched a voracious dive into contemporary music. The crash-course transformation still shapes the way he writes, learns, and pushes forward today.micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissionsmicro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Joshua Mallard discusses how his background in contemporary classical music — particularly as a flutist — informs his approach to scoring video games. He explains how extended techniques and concert-hall aesthetics can surprise and engage game audiences, and shares why the divide between concert and game music might not be as wide as it seems.micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram @loose.leaf.transmissions.micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Caterina Schembri talks about discovering composition before she even knew how to play an instrument—a late start that came from a broader hunger for creative expression. She describes how Debussy’s piano music opened something in her, giving her a sense of color, atmosphere, and possibility that she felt compelled to understand from the inside. Those early years were a blur of theory lessons, piano practice, and first attempts at shaping harmony on her own terms. Even now, she still begins at the piano, letting harmony lead her thinking—a trace of how she first entered music by intuition, curiosity, and sheer momentum.micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissionsmicro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Gabriel Bolaños centers his work on timbre, particularly the ambiguous zone where an oboe in its high register stops sounding like an oboe. Because this threshold is subjective—dependent on listener experience, acoustics, variables beyond control—he saturates pieces with multiple layers of timbral ambiguity so that if one element fails, others carry the effect. Collaborating with performers, he seeks sounds unusual enough to notate reliably without becoming recognizable performance practice. From there, he builds structures: harmonic progressions made from timbre, sudden interruptions instead of gradual morphing. Microtonality emerged from spectral approximations of frequencies but now lives in his intuition. In Slew, quarter-tone-flat guitars surround audiences with overtone series that cohere and separate like waves. He pushed the piece to extremes—no compromises—making it visceral enough that even unfamiliar listeners could feel its intention, like Xenakis. Ambiguity, he insists, preserves magic; recognizability kills it.micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissionsmicro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Hannah Boissonneault reflects on the evolving attitudes toward genre and identity within classical music — and how her own experience in academic spaces revealed both barriers and opportunities. She shares how supportive mentors and collaborative communities helped her break away from rigid definitions of what a “composer” should be, and how that shift opened up a more expansive, personal, and integrated creative practice.micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions. Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissionsmicro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

Shruthi Rajasekar reflects on growing up in a deeply musical household shaped by her mother’s work as a Carnatic vocalist and collaborator across cultures. She and Tyler talk about the intersections of Indian and Western classical traditions, early encounters with instruments like the cello and clarinet, and the way curiosity and openness became part of her musical DNA.micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on social media @LooseLeafTransmissions.micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

For Graeme Shields, composing started as play—long afternoons with friends huddled around the family computer, experimenting with Finale and discovering the thrill of sound on command. Those early experiments evolved into something more intentional: arranging, composing, and eventually finding community at the Junior Composers Institute, where he met living composers and heard his music performed for the first time. A conversation about how curiosity becomes commitment.micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissionsmicro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

For Fire Ecologies, Christopher Stark spent months working with field recordings made near California wildfires, and just as much time deciding what not to include. A long recording of an actual forest fire originally closed the piece; he cut it less than a day before final production, leaving behind only indirect traces — water that sounds like fire, a Sierra Nevada power line slowed down until its buzz becomes something closer to marching boots. The same instinct shaped his choices in the field: standing in a town that had just burned, camera in hand, Stark found he couldn't bring himself to record people in front of what remained of their homes, even as a documentary-minded friend urged him to. The excerpt sits inside that tension — between bearing witness and observing from a respectful distance, and what it means for work like this to edge toward activism without losing the line between representing something and exploiting it.Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissionsmicro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.

For Yue Song, confidence didn’t come first—it arrived after years of imitation, theory, and hesitation. Growing up in China, Yue learned piano alongside her sister, studying under traditional mentors who emphasized balance and restraint. But it wasn’t until she moved to Ireland, surrounded by experimental musicians and new collaborators, that she rediscovered her creative spark—and began composing every day.micro/Maker episodes release every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday!Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.Support Loose Leaf Transmissions on Patreon at patreon.com/LooseLeafTransmissions.Follow us on Instagram: @loose.leaf.transmissionsmicro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.