Simon Emmerson (composer)

Simon Emmerson is an electroacoustic music composer working mostly with live electronics. He was born in Wolverhampton, UK, on 15 September 1950.

Simon Emmerson studied at Cambridge and at City University, London where he founded the electroacoustic music studio in 1975, remaining until 2004 when he joined De Montfort University, Leicester as Professor in Music, Technology and Innovation, and where he is now Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Sonic Creativity. He has been a composer and writer on electroacoustic music since the early 1970s. Commissions include: Intermodulation, Singcircle, Lontano, Jane Manning, Philip Mead, Jane Chapman, GRM (Paris), IMEB (Bourges), Inventionen (Berlin), Sond-Arte Ensemble (Lisbon), and more recently for BEAST (Birmingham) and for soloists Darragh Morgan (violin), Carla Rees (flute) and Heather Roche (clarinet). He was a first prize winner at the Bourges Electroacoustic Awards in 1985 for his work Time Past IV (soprano and tape, commissioned by Jane Manning). Writings include: The Language of Electroacoustic Music (1986), Music, Electronic Media and Culture (2000), Living Electronic Music (2007), The Routledge Research Companion to Electronic Music (2018), coeditor and contributor Expanding the Horizon of Electroacoustic Music Analysis (2016). He was founder Secretary of the Electro-Acoustic Music Association of Great Britain (EMAS) in 1979 as well as later Board member of Sonic Arts Network (to 2004) and Sound and Music (2008-2013). He was Edgard Varese Visiting Professor at TU, Berlin (2009-10) and Visiting Professor and Composer at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (Perth) in November 2016. Keynotes include: ACMC 2011 (Auckland), ICMC 2011 (Huddersfield), Music Science Technology 2012 (São Paulo), WOCMAT 2012 (Taiwan), Alternative Histories of Electronic Music 2016 (London), Midlands New Music Symposium (NottFAR) 2020, EMS Network (2021).