Víctor González

Almost everything I write starts with a need: a choir, an ensemble, an event, players at a particular level, and a date; I’m creating something that has to work. But there’s always something of mine in it too, the way a joke between friends isn’t the best joke in the world, but it’s ours.

For years I wondered whether you can write music with algorithms without losing control of the music. I finally gave all those years of trials and questions a shape in my degree thesis, Musical creation as an algorithm. As with most things in music, the answer depends, and the interesting part is what it depends on.

I owe all this, among many other friends, to three teachers: Vicente Cuadrado, for welcoming me into music; Jordi Blanch, for teaching me that music is lived; and Marc García, for helping me write when I didn’t believe I could.

I’m producing the recording of the musical Yo mataré miedos por ti, so it can be staged live without an orchestra. The composer gave me the scores; I kept the sounds that already worked, then programmed the piano, percussion and solos, and edited and mixed everything until it was ready for a theatre.

I’ve learned to mix the way a rehearsal is run. Editing is practising at home: each part has to sound right on its own. Mixing is rehearsing: listening to the whole, finding the problems and fixing them, deciding the balances. The hard part is listening and knowing what’s needed, and I’ve been learning that in rehearsal rooms (and in some code reviews).

Guitar is my instrument, classical and electric, both for more than twenty years. For more than a decade I’ve played in concerts of choirs and amateur ensembles. I was called in to play, but I saw I could do more; soon I was also on keys, writing the band parts, meeting the conductor to find where the arrangement could help the choir, and handling cables, mics, chairs and the venue’s technicians so the conductor had one less thing to think about on concert day.

It became so natural that I ended up doing the same, this time purely backstage, for Desluthiers, a group that for years staged tributes to Les Luthiers, slipping numbers of their own into the programme.

I’ve been making software for more than fifteen years. At xarvio, BASF’s digital farming platform, I was part of (and often led) the team that processed and published geographic data: satellite imagery that ends up in the maps telling farm machinery how much to apply and where. Like concerts, wheat doesn’t move its dates however far behind you are; there were rushes, complex problems, mistakes… but there were also results on the day.

Before that, as a freelancer, I helped build the platform for FAO that lets forestry specialists across Latin America publish their own monitoring data, and trained them to use it.

Most recently I was at geomatico, a cooperative where people matter above everything else. From November 2026, I’m freelance again.