During the past 15 or so years I have composed digital music that minutely simulates live performance on acoustic instruments but which is unplayable by human hands. A constant question has been how to cross the gulf between listeners’ experience of concerts and recordings. The spectacle of performance with its social rituals and formal artifice, the variation between different performances, unpredictability of even familiar music: these can’t be matched by listening to a recording: the separation between performance and listening to recordings is profound.

Music is now made that was impossible before digital technology but the digital listener’s experience is poorer than those hearing a live performance.

Mid 20th century and later experiments, with computers or speakers replacing performers, were still essentially just about sitting with other people in a room to listen to a recording.

Audiences remain unconvinced that these experiences are as compelling or meaningful as watching an accomplished soloist coax successive wafting bubbles of tactile sonic geometries from a strung wooden box or valve-stopped brass pipe.

I am going to be working with colleagues in virtual acoustics research to change all this. . .

Zones of Intensities:    
Auditory Hyper-Reality and Virtual Music Performance   

and editing for 1^st (virtual) performance. . .
      concerto for piano & string orchestra "n"


Recently completed. . .
      Caedmon's Hymn    3-D audio (headset)
      &
      the 1^st of a new series for virtual piano,    Music for (Inhuman) Keyboard, 2011    played by sampled bosendorfer concert grand in large resonant virtual hall



for a list of compositions to date, including scores (pdf) and audio (mp3):   browse