Gerhard Eckel is Professor of Computer Music and Multimedia at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM), University of Music and Performing Arts (KUG) in Graz, Austria. He creates sound and music installations for real and virtual spaces, which are presented at international festivals, conferences and trade fairs as well as in museums and galleries.
Eckel holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of Vienna (1989). In addition to his scientific training he studied Composition of Electroacoustic Music (with Dieter Kaufmann) and Sound Engineering at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst Vienna. European scholarships brought him to the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht in 1985 and to IRCAM, the computer music department of the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1987. Eckel worked as artistic-scientific researcher at IRCAM (1989–1996) and at the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication (IMK) in St. Augustin, Germany (1996–2005).

His research work at IRCAM focused on the construction of computer tools for composition, sound synthesis and visualisation. In 1989 he invented the user interface paradigm SpecDraw for the AudioSculpt application. He was also involved in the development of the physical modelling system Modalys. From 1994 onwards he headed his own research group Interfaces et représetations des sons. At Fraunhofer IMK he worked in a virtual reality (VR) department where he specialized in 3D audio rendering for projection-based VR systems. His group built the first CAVE in Germany in 1996.
In his most recent artistic research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), he and his team develop a new paradigm of intermedial expression: Embodied Generative Music. Since 2007 he directs IEM. His latest project Choreography of Sound is funded in context of the FWF’s new artistic research funding program PEEK.