Aftab Hafeez Profile Photo

Bio

Who I am: I'm a traditionally trained musical artist turned creative technologist. I use my edge as a professional researcher and coder to build technologies for diverse clients.

As a formally-trained composer and music producer, I've had the opportunity to work with a variety of clients: from scoring soundtracks for award-winning media and artists, including Grammy and Emmy-winners, to enhancing UX sound for clients such as Google and Facebook (now Meta), to producing for underground rap artists abroad. Being mixed-race Colombian and Pakistani, I reflect a multitude of culturally-attuned sounds. I specialize in multiple genres - Rap, Pop, Electronic, Reggaeton - with my film scores ranging from intimate solo piano to full-orchestral arrangements.

My work in audio UX has shaped the sounds millions hear daily on their devices. At Google, I led research that was critical to the audio experience for Project Moohan (now Galaxy XR) - Google & Samsung's XR headset. I bring both creativity and scientific rigor to every project, understanding not just what sounds good, but why it resonates with people across different cultures and contexts.

As a technologist, I bring 10+ years as a researcher, focusing on audio user experience and psychoacoustics, with emphasis on quantitiative and biometric methods (EEG, GSR, eyetracking). I also write code, and have helped my clients develop in-house audio apps and features.

A few projects I'm proud of include PitchBuni, an ear training app for perfect pitch using research-based methods; spatial audio technology for XR; and VR applications developed in association with Stanford University. I thrive where creative vision and scientific and technical rigor intersect. I am mostly motivated by the impossible, and pushing the limits of traditional human communication.

Specialties

  • Music Composition & Production
  • UX Sound Design & Sonic Branding
  • Spatial Audio
  • Audio UX Research
  • VR/XR Application Development

Recognition

  • Visual Atelier 8, 2022 Weekly Selected Artist
  • Semi-Finalist, 2020 International Songwriting Competition
  • GFFA Special Mention for "Redemption" (2020)

Featured Projects

Technical Expertise

Audio Production

Ableton Live Logic Pro X Pro Tools

Research

Psychoacoustics Spatial Audio Audio User Experience

Audio Technology

Web Audio API Librosa Audio ML

Game Development/XR

Unity Unreal Blender C#

Web Development

Frontend
HTML CSS Javascript Typescript React Next.js Vite Three.js Tailwind CSS
Backend
Node.js Python FastAPI Flask PostgreSQL Supabase Firebase

AI/ML & Data Science

TensorFlow PyTorch Transformers (Hugging Face) LLM APIs (Anthropic/OpenAI) scikit-learn NLTK spaCy Jupyter