Curtis Roads

Curtis Roads creates, teaches, and pursues research in the interdisciplinary territory spanning music and sound technology. His specialties include electronic music composition, microsound synthesis, graphical synthesis, sound analysis and transformation, sound spatialization and the history of electronic music. He is Professor in the Media Arts and Technology Program at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is keenly interested in the integration of electronic music with visual and spatial media, as well as the visualization and sonification of data. Certain of his compositions feature granular and pulsar synthesis, methods he developed for generating sound from acoustical particles. These are featured in his set »Point Line Cloud« (Asphodel, 2005). His writings include over a hundred monographs, research articles, reports, and reviews. Books include the textbook »The Computer Music Tutorial« (1996, The MIT Press), »Musical Signal Processing« (co-editor, 1997, Routledge, London), »L'audionumerique« (3rd edition 2016, Dunod, Paris), »The Computer Music Tutorial – Japanese edition« (January 2001, Denki Daigaku Shuppan, Tokyo). »Microsound« (2001, The MIT Press) explores the aesthetics and techniques of composition with sound particles. The Chinese edition of »The Computer Music Tutorial« was published in 2011 (People's Music Publishing, Beijing). His new book is »Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic« (2015 Oxford).