Dirk Vander Wilt is a PhD Candidate in NYU Steinhardt's Music and Audio Research Lab (MARL) under the advisement of Dr. Morwaread Farbood. He is currently researching novel technologies to increase accessibility for live events, particularly live musical theater. His particular interest within this field is the creation and deployment of audio description. His work draws from disciplines as diverse as Music Information Retrieval, Human-Computer Interaction, and theatrical script analysis. He holds a BFA in film and television production and an MA in music composition, both from NYU. His peer-reviewed research has been published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (2020), and he has presented at international conferences including Audio Mostly (2019 - received Best Paper Award), ASSETS (2019) and CMMR (2019).