Curtis Roads

Curtis Roads

Composer

Curtis Roads studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles) and the University of California, San Diego. He received his doctorate from the University of Paris VIII. He now teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Dr. Roads was a researcher in computer music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1980 to 1987. He then taught at the University of Naples “Federico II,” Harvard University, Oberlin Conservatory, Les Ateliers UPIC, and the University of Paris VIII.

Many of his compositions feature granular and pulsar synthesis, methods he implemented for synthesizing sound from acoustical particles. Together with Alberto de Campo, he has recently developed a new program for particle synthesis called PulsarGenerator. They also developed the Creatovox, a new digital synthesizer for expressive performance of particle synthesis.

Co-founder of the International Computer Music Association (1980), he also served as an editor of Computer Music Journal for 23 years. His writings include over 150 monographs, research articles, reports, and reviews. Some of these have been translated and printed in Italian, French, German, Spanish, Finnish, Chinese, and Japanese. Recent books include the textbook The Computer Music Tutorial (1996, MIT Press), Musical Signal Processing (co-editor, 1997, Swets and Zeitlinger), L’audionumérique (1999, Éditions Dunod), and The Computer Music Tutorial-Japanese edition (2001, Denki Daigaku Shuppan). His latest book, Microsound (forthcoming, The MIT Press), explores the aesthetics and techniques of composition with acoustic particles.