Charlie Chan
Charlie Chan (they/them) is an award-winning AI inventor, creative-technologist, keynote speaker, composer and pianist, with a career spanning four decades and underscored by a lifelong commitment to innovation, advocacy and creative practice.
Charlie is renowned for developing cutting-edge technology as well as their signature blend of contemporary and classical music. They collaborate with musicians, performers, filmmakers, artists and digital visionaries to push the boundaries of music and technology.
Charlie is now working at the vanguard of AI in music, having invented their own AI – named Ch.AI – which composes music, just like they do.
Charlie’s work as a composer is unparalleled in both scale and approach: They have over 5000 works registered with APRA/AMCOS and have released 60 albums across the course of their career.
Charlie is driven by a foundational belief that creativity is infinite; that it’s a deep well from which we can all draw, all the time. This philosophy is supported by their profound, prolific & enduring achievements across the 40-year span of their career.
BACKGROUND
Charlie started playing piano at age 3, double bass at 12, and was the music copyist on Young Talent Time at 13. When Charlie was 16, they started U25 Theatre, a company for people under 25.
By age 17 Charlie was straddling classical and contemporary - performing in the Percy Grainger Youth Orchestra, the Elizabethan Theatre Trust Orchestra and as Musical Director of the Williamstown Light Opera Company, while also touring with 80s headliners Electric Pandas, Allniters and The Stray Dags.
Charlie was composer-in-residence at Sidetrack Theatre, The Theatre of the Deaf, Toe Truck Theatre and Canberra Youth Theatre. They also composed and performed original scores for the Sydney Theatre Company, Belvoir, Glen St Theatre, Salamanca Theatre, Terrapin and Tasdance.
Charlie was an early adopter of Fairlight technology: At 19 they were one of the few artists in the world who knew not only how to play Fairlights, but also how to fix them, touring Europe as backline with world-leading New Wave and New Romantic bands of the day.
Returning to Australia as Musical Director at the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre, Charlie collaborated with Stephen Page and his brothers during the formative years of Bangarra.
Then in 1990, at age 24, Charlie was signed to Sony Masterworks. By the age of 30 they’d released three critically and commercially acclaimed albums: The Adventures of Charlie Chan, East & West and Wild Swans.
Throughout this time Charlie was in demand as a digital pioneer, working with Apple, Casio and Yamaha on music technology. Wild Swans was the first Australian CD to feature multimedia “extras” created by Charlie: Till then CDs had only ever contained music files.
In 1995 Charlie founded Martian Music and became the first Australian to sell their music directly from the web.
The following year they narrowcast the first ever live Australian concerts on the web – Charlie Chan and Friends was webcast from Belvoir, Universal and Lyric Theatres, using Charlie’s own webcast technology.
With the advent of music streaming services in the mid 2000s, Charlie expanded Martian into a digital download service: its internet-based sales and distribution mechanism pioneered music e-commerce in Australia. Charlie made it open source & thousands of Australian artists used it to derive greater income from sales and directly reach audiences across the world.
Through the 1990s Charlie served on the Board of the Australian Guild of Screen Composers and as Head of the Music Committee on the Board of the Australia Council, also directing Music and Sound Design courses at AFTRS and lecturing in Digital Technology at the SAE Institute.
Since the late 1990s Charlie has been composing for screen – from dramas such as McLeod’s Daughters and hundreds of hours of documentary, to the much-loved original theme of Australian Story, and most recently on Stan’s Dani Laidley feature Two Tribes.
In 2013 Charlie founded the Global Orchestra, uniting musicians worldwide to drive social and environmental change through music. Utilising state-of-the-art technology, the Global Orchestra’s concerts have engaged millions of musicians and music lovers globally. In 2017 Charlie partnered with Accenture to establish the Interactive Orchestra, showcasing the fusion of technology and creativity at the Sydney Opera House, leading a marimba-playing robot to improvise with a jazz ensemble.
In 2019 Charlie performed at the United Nations General Assembly in New York as part of the UNICEF summit held on World Children’s Day to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Together with the PS22 Chorus - a 60-strong children’s choir from Staten Island - Charlie performed their original song We The Children commissioned for Damon Gameau’s climate change documentary 2040.
During Covid lockdowns they created and hosted Museful Live, offering meditation through music via a series of live-streamed events.
In 2023 Charlie released Constellation, a series of 52 albums over 52 weeks - a mix of recorded but never before mastered or released pieces, along with many brand new works composed and recorded each week of release, in a record-shattering, marathon opus made up of 365 individual compositions.
In the same year Charlie also performed a record-setting endurance show called Supernova, a 26+hour improvised piano concert on the Outdoor Stage at HOTA on Queensland’s Gold Coast. In order to have breaks and micro-naps during the continuous show, Charlie was supported by Ch.AI, Charlie’s own AI which they’ve been developing over the past seven years.
Charlie is a sought-after keynote speaker who has delivered keynotes for NASA, Apple, Google, Accenture, Adobe, IBM and most recently Dell.