Ryaan Ahmed plays lute, theorbo, and early guitars and is active in the Boston area as a continuo player, soloist, and vocal coach. He is the music director of the Harvard Early Music Society and led that company in a fully-staged production of Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto in the New College Theatre in the fall of 2011. He was the 2010–2011 director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum Chamber Singers and led the group on tours of New York and Germany. He is a member of the Erwin Bodky Award-winning Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra and was an accompanist at the 2011 Vancouver Early Music Baroque Vocal Programme. This past summer, he received the Harvard Office for the Arts Artist Development Fellowship, which allowed him to pursue full-time lute studies with Pat O’Brien in New York City. He has performed in masterclasses with Benjamin Bagby, William Christie, Nigel North, Stephen Stubbs, and Judy Tarling. His primary teachers have been Pat O'Brien and Doug Freundlich.

Ryaan is pursuing an AB in Computer Science with a Secondary Field in Music at Harvard University, where his academic interests center on the application of computational methods to musicology. His current research includes work on machine translation of Winchester Troper organa and the evolution of plucked instrument accompaniment at the beginning of the 17th century.