Godfried-Willem Raes is the director of the now highly endangered Logos Foundation, an institute where artistic and technological research converge with experimental musics.
In this lecture he will present an overview of his research activity, including both failures and achievements. The driving forces behind his commitment to contribute to the development of new tools for musical expression will be revealed. Two main areas will be covered: the search for tools to capture and classify human expressive gesture at the one hand, and the realisation of a very large collection of musical robots, making up the Logos robot orchestra. 

Godfried-Willem Raes studied musicology and philosophy at the Ghent State University as well as piano, clarinet, percussion and composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music of Gent. 
He has also published a great number of critical essays and articles in specialized publications. In 1982 he received the Louis Paul Boon Award for the social engagement in his artistic work. In 1988 he became a professor of music composition at the Ghent Royal Conservatory. In 1997 he also became a professor at the Orpheus Higher Institute for Music, a commitment he held, up to 2009. In 1990 he designed and constructed a tetrahedron-shaped concert-hall for the Logos Foundation in Ghent, a project for which it received the Tech-Art prize 1990.
Next to his reputation as a composer, he is also a well known expert in computer technology, robotics and interactive electronic art. He holds a doctors degree from Ghent State University on the basis of his dissertation on the technology of virtual instruments of his design and invention. He is the author of an extensive real time algorithmic music composition programming language: <GMT> running on the Wintel platform.
He was a full time research and composition professor at the Ghent University Association, School of Arts, until his retirement in 2014, but he is still active in the research group of systematic musicology at the Ghent University.
He is currently also an Associate Researcher at the Orpheus Research Centre in Music. (OrCIM).