Keon Ju Maverick Lee / Leigh

Keon Ju Maverick Lee is an techno-fluent artist-researcher, electronic percussionist/drummer, electronic music composer/producer, and generative music/sound artist specializing in designing co-creative musical AI agents and interactive music systems for drum and percussion performances. He holds a Master’s in computer music from the University of Victoria (UVic) and is pursuing a research-creation Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University (SFU) Metacreation Lab for Creative AI. Keon’s work blends academic research and artistic practice, focusing on the intersection of music and artificial intelligence. As an educator, he has taught sound design at SFU and computer music at the UVic.

Keon’s research explores co-creative music improvisation systems, culminating in a custom musical agent system enabling dynamic collaboration between human performers and AI. This system was featured in a live performance where Keon, as a percussionist, collaborated with a guitarist in Echoes of Synthetic Forest, a Top 10 finalist in the 2024 AI Music Song Contest performed. His work has also been showcased at the MusicAcoustica Festival and the AISMR performance at Montréal’s ArtIA Symposium, SAT.

He collaborates with research colleagues in institutions such as the Centre for Digital Music in London, CIRMMT in Montréal, and IRCAM in Paris and has published on musical AI in venues including the AI Music Creativity Conference, Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, and NIPS workshops. Recently, he contributed to the ReVerie project, featured at Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH in 2024, and IEEE VR in 2025. Through innovative AI-driven musical agents, Keon advances real-time artistic expression and fosters groundbreaking human-machine collaborations.