Jacob Adler

Jacob Adler is a composer, pianist, organist and educator based in Arizona. His own bio calls him a composer, pianist, educator and filmmaker who specialises in tuning systems and advanced rhythm. He holds a BFA and an MM in composition from Arizona State University and studied organ performance at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and composition at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, according to his ASU profile.

He has taught music theory at Arizona State University since 2011 and also at Paradise Valley Community College, where he has directed the Openscore Ensemble since 2013. The ensemble arranges and performs works by Ligeti, Steve Reich, Julius Eastman, Messiaen, Perotin and Arvo Part, and played Philip Glass's four-hour opera Einstein on the Beach at the Phoenix Art Museum in 2019. His rhythm textbook Wheels Within Wheels is reported to have sold in over 50 countries, and he has released six albums, playing piano, organ, laptop, accordion, tanpura and tsimbl in early music, contemporary classical, Hindustani, free jazz and klezmer groups.

Total Pixel Space, a nine-and-a-half-minute video essay, was posted to YouTube in December 2024. The Daily Doc page says he made it in 2024 using AI tools and narrates it himself; coverage names Runway's Gen-3 video model, Midjourney for images and ElevenLabs for narration. It imagines every possible digital image and film as a combination of pixels, and draws on Borges's The Library of Babel.

It won the Grand Prix at the third Runway AI Film Festival in New York and Los Angeles in 2025, and Laughing Squid and MIT Technology Review covered it. Adler told MIT Technology Review that AI is one tool in the creator's toolbox, alongside a camera, paint or pencil. His site says he is producing a feature-length film about information theory, evolution and complex systems, with support from WW7, due in summer 2026.