Michael Lukaszuk’s composition Impossible Dust earned an honourable mention in the 2025 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest. Lukaszuk is a Canadian composer and researcher with interests in electronic music and sound art and exploring the cultural dimensions of technology in music. His work often explores themes such as digital liveness and seeks to find meaning in various forms of malfunction. His artistic and research outputs have been presented at The International Computer Music Conference and multiple proceedings of International Symposium on Electronic Art, with awards from organizations such as the Canadian Electroacoustic Community and the SOCAN Foundation. His writings on electroacoustic and computer music can be found in Journal for Artistic Research and Emille (Korean Electro-Acoustic Music Community). He currently works as an assistant teaching professor at the University of New Brunswick.
Here’s Lukaszuk’s program text for Impossible Dust:
Impossible Dust is part of an ongoing series of electronic works. On a conceptual level, this piece considers dust as a metaphor for timelessness, finality, and the afterlife. Other parts of the series explored this theme by using a variety of approaches—for example, disintegrating and sonifying old photographs to form patterns of audible and visual dust. On a technical level, most of the initial sounds used in this version of the piece came from patches in an FM synthesis software and some experiments with Moog desktop synths like their Subharmonicon instrument.
An important additional resource was a machine learning software from IRCAM called RAVE. This performs a process sometimes called “timbre transfer,” where an incoming sound, such as a synth, is transformed to assume characteristics of some audio in a model. I trained a model on some public domain historical recordings that I felt reflected the theme. So, in addition to getting glimpses of choral voices peeking through the ambient textures, the artifacts from the older recordings also become part of this process.
The 2025 Musicworks EMC Contest received 127 composition entries from 17 countries. Read the media release with the full list of 2025 winners.
Learn more about Michael Lukaszuk and his work here.