Juan Verdaguer is a composer, sound designer, performer, and teacher based in the Netherlands. Born in Buenos Aires, he came to Europe to study music and never quite left — drawn first to the carillon towers of the Netherlands, then to the studios and concert halls of The Hague, and eventually to a practice that refuses to stay in one place.
He studied beiaard at the Utrecht Conservatorium and later completed master's degrees in Music and Art of Sound and Sonology at the Koninklijk Conservatorium Den Haag. But the most formative parts of his education have never been exclusively institutional. Over more than two decades, the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen has been the backbone of his artistic thinking — studied, performed, projected, taught, and returned to again and again. He has attended the Stockhausen-Kurse in Kürten multiple times, worked as sound projectionist for productions at the Beethovenfest and the Goethe Institut, and was part of the core team that brought aus LICHT to the Holland Festival in 2019, working on SYNTHI-FOU, MICHAELs JUGEND, MICHAELs REISE, LUZIFERs TANZ, MÄDCHENPROZESSION, EVAs LIED, INVASION-EXPLOSION, and ENGEL-PROZESSIONEN. For him, sound projection is not a technical service but a musical act — one that demands the same quality of listening and interpretive commitment as performance or composition.
Alongside this, he has worked as a sound designer at the Nationale Opera & Ballet in Amsterdam, and as a composer and performer with Blickwinkel Art, where music, projection, and installation have met in works like URBAUM — a spatial environment created with Christopher Collings. In Possible Impossibells, developed through the Virtual Bells project, he explored the border between the acoustic world of the carillon and digitally transformed sound. These works share a lasting interest in resonance, transformation, and what happens when one sound world encounters another.
His curiosity runs wide. He has spent years studying film — not as a professional detour but as a genuine intellectual pursuit — and the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet has left a lasting mark: filmmakers who treat sound as a structural and political force, and who subject every formal decision to the same rigorous scrutiny. That quality of attention — the refusal to let anything in a work be accidental — is something he carries into his own practice.
Teaching has been a consistent thread throughout. He has taught music theory, harmony, counterpoint, analysis, notation software, and electronic music in both freelance and institutional settings. In 2017–2018 he designed and taught a course on Stockhausen's electronic music for the KC's aus LICHT master students. He also develops software through Many Sound Worlds, including MusicPad for iPad — a tool for musicians who want to write by hand in a direct and musical way. The development work and the artistic work come from the same impulse: a belief in tools that are honest about what they are and clear about what they do.
At the centre of all of it is a simple conviction: that composing, listening, performing, teaching, and building are not separate disciplines but different ways of paying attention to sound — and to the world it moves through.
Many Sound Worlds is where those paths meet.