Curtis Roads

Biography:

Ph.D. University of Paris VIII, Music, specialties: composition, microsound synthesis, graphical synthesis, sound analysis and transformation, sound spatialisation, history of electronic music.

Curtis Roads teaches and pursues research in the interdisciplinary territory spanning music and technology. He was Editor and Associate Editor of Computer Music Journal (The MIT Press) from 1978 to 2000, and cofounded the International Computer Music Association in 1979. A researcher in computer music at MIT (1980-1986), he also worked in the computer industry for a decade. He was invited to teach electronic music composition at Harvard University, and sound synthesis techniques at the University of Naples. He was appointed Director of Pedagogy at Les Ateliers UPIC (later CCMIX) and Lecturer in the Music Department of the University of Paris VIII. Among his books are the anthologies Foundations of Computer Music (1985, The MIT Press) and The Music Machine (1989, The MIT Press). His textbook The Computer Music Tutorial (1996, The MIT Press) is widely adopted as a standard classroom text and has been published in French (1999, second edition 2007), Japanese (2001), and Chinese (2008) editions. He edited the anthology Musical Signal Processing in 1997. His book, Microsound (2002, The MIT Press) presents the techniques and aesthetics of composition with sound particles. A pioneer in the development of granular synthesis (1974), he also developed (with Alberto de Campo) a sound particle synthesis program PulsarGenerator (2001), distributed by the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UCSB. His collection of electronic music compositions POINT LINE CLOUD won the Award of Distinction at the 2002 Ars Electronica in Linz and was released as a CD + DVD on the Asphodel label in 2005. His new book is Composing Electronic Music (forthcoming) published by Oxford University Press in 2009. A new revised edition of The Computer Music Tutorial by The MIT Press is also forthcoming. He is keenly interested in the integration of electronic music with visual and spatial media. Since 2004, he has been researching a new method of sound analysis that is the analytical counterpart of granular synthesis called matching pursuit atomic decomposition. This research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.