Mári Mákó is an interdisciplinary artist and composer. She is focusing on experimental performance practices. While combining mediums and disciplines has an important role in her art, sound is a key element of her practice. Since the beginning of her career, she has sought to show the creation process on stage as well as to break down the fixed form of musical pieces into organic, communal activities. These aspirations characterize her four main musical practices: live electronics, spatial electroacoustic music, audiovisual performances, and designing/building instruments. These practices are informed by her main research topics: the ecology of listening, experimental notations and semiotics, conducting processes and movement culture, with a focus on the psychological effects of flow and deep listening.
Her musical practice mixes the roots of industrial music, experimental electronic and glitch music with drone textures.

When Mákó designs and builds her own performative tools, she focuses on the depths of physical gestures and their relation to sound. For this, she builds electronic instruments with various sensors and programmed chaotic sound processes to create unique performative tools. As a result, these instruments utilize a certain choreographic design, making both performance and composition interdisciplinary acts: unconventional musical practices that nurture the flow experience of the compositional processes. Assisted by oscillators and sensors of her own design, these electronic instruments – such as Schmitt the oscillator, or the dance pole instrument designed for theater-maker Sofie Kramer – create sound while organically reacting to environmental changes such as light and movement. This shifts these tools from being traditional musical instruments towards something that might be considered almost something conscious, almost like a nervous system. While creating musical instruments, her goal is to liberate the use of new creations by the history of instruments.
As an audiovisual performer and composer, Mári Mákó systematically seeks to challenge the recital form of concerts, within which the musician is destined to follow the pathway set by the conductor and the stepping stones of the sheet music. Instead, she is interested in exploring how the performer is reacting to music. For that, she is using her own compositional technique, conducting with graphic symbols, while employing deep listening and leaving plenty of room for association for the musicians. Considering it less of an improvisation in the traditional sense and more like the freedom of creation on the stage (on the spot, in the flow), she explores how this freedom evokes ever-changing musicality within the fixed structure of a sheet music. Flow also plays a central role in her practice as a composer: in her pieces, she seeks the experience of musical flow between the musicians and the composer. This has been the case when she was collaborating with artists with different backgrounds: dancers, visual artists, researchers and ensembles.
Mári Mákó toured her solo pieces from Gaudeamus Festival in Utrecht to Tampere Music Festival in Finland as well as to Canada at the New Emergents concert series of Music Gallery, Toronto. Her piece entitled Rothko and me in the time of quarantine, written for solo electronics and zither, was commissioned by Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in 2020.

Mári Mákó received her Singing Minor and a Bachelor’s in Sonology at the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire of Den Haag, and a Master of Music at the Composition Department of the Royal Conservatoire of Den Haag. She was composer in residence in various sound studios in the Netherlands and Canada. She is currently based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where she is a composer in residence at iii in Den Haag, while working on her DLA thesis in Multimedia at MOME Doctoral School in Budapest, Hungary. Her current research topics are the art of listening, deep listening practices, and flow. Her debut album Oudemian came out in 2021, supported by Fondspodium Kunsten & Sena production. The album’s focal point is how an existential crisis can serve as a base for personal growth, metamorphosis and rebirth.