Alan Belkin is a prolific composer of eight symphonies, five concertos, four string quartets and many other works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and soloists. He has a DMA from Juilliard, where he studied with David Diamond. He taught composition, harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration for over thirty years at the University of Montreal and is now retired. He is the author of Musical Composition, Craft and Art, published in 2018 by Yale University Press.

Belkin is very active online. His YouTube channel has nearly 19,000 subscribers, and his website is a basic reference for online music study, featuring free PDF books on many musical subjects. It receives thousands of visits every year.

Andrew Schartmann (Ph.D. Yale, M.A. McGill) is a Professor of Music Theory at the New England Conservatory. Prior to joining NEC, he served as an affiliate faculty member at Yale's Center for Collaborative Arts and Media. In 2011, he was awarded the Schulich School of Music Teaching Award for his course on musical form in the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Schartmann is the author of two books, including Koji Kondo's Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack (2015), which The New Yorker praised for its “overwhelming precision.” Schartmann's work has also appeared in Frieze, Slate, and Clavier Companion, among others. In 2016, he worked with the BBC on the documentary “While My Guitar Gently Bleeps,” which traces the influence of retro game sound on modern-day pop culture.

He is the Associate Editor of DSCH Journal—a biannual publication devoted to the life and work of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich-and serves as a board member of The Journal of Sound and Music in Games. In 2019, Schartmann was elected Treasurer of the New England Conference of Music Theorists, and he currently holds the position of Audio Director at Play4REAL Lab, composing sound and music for video games.