Prof Michael Clarke

Biography

Professor Michael Clarke is Director of the Electroacoustic Music Studio at the University of Huddersfield, and Director of Research and Graduate Education for the School of Music, Humanities and Media. He studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Durham University and holds a PhD in composition.

Clarke's work as a composer and programmer has resulted in extended visits to major studios abroad. These include eight months at EMS, Stockholm, five months at IRCAM, Paris, and one month each at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and, most recently, SARC, Belfast. From 2000-4 he was Music Coordinator of International Computer Music Association. He served on the AHRC Research Panel 7 for three years and is currently a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. He also served on an interdisciplinary panel for the EPSRC.

Research & Scholarship

As a composer his works (which include both acoustic and electroacoustic pieces, most often combining these media) have received many performances and broadcasts throughout the world. In 1983 Soundings (cello and tape) won the CIM France prize at Bourges, in 1984 Uppvaknande (computer generated tape) was awarded the Chandos Prize at Musica Nova in Glasgow and in 1997 he was awarded the Musica Nova Prize in Prague for the octophonic tape work Tim(br)e. Other works include Prism and Cascade for the trumpeter Stephen Altoft, Constellations (for piano, percussion and computer) commissioned for the Verblendungen festival in Belgium, ThreeFour for the Goldberg Ensemble and Enmeshed written for L a u t and premiered at the 2005 Sonorities Festival in Belfast. A CD of four of his works

(Refractions, Mälarsång, Epicycle and Uppvaknande) is available under the collective title Refractions (MPSCD003). His most recent compositional work includes more pieces in the ongoing Enmeshed series (for piano -2007, and for pitched percussion - 2008). Recently he has had works played in New Orleans (USA), Belfast, London (recorded by BBC Radio 3), Manchester, Bangor, Freiburg (Germany), and Vitoria (Spain) as well as at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

Clarke is also active in developing new algorithms and software for music. His unit-generators for FOF and FOG synthesis have become a standard part of MIT's Csound program. More recently, in collaboration with Xavier Rodet of IRCAM he has developed the fofb~ and fog~ objects for Max/MSP (distributed by IRCAM). Clarke has directed three European Academic Software Award winning projects: SYnthia - Synthesis Instruction Aid (developed together with Stuart Hunter) at the 1994 competition in Heidelberg, CALMA - Computer Assisted Learning for Musical Awareness (together with Julia Bowder and James Saunders) in 2000 in Rotterdam, and Sybil - Synthesis by Interactive Learning (together with Ashley Watkins, Mathew Adkins and Mark Bokowiec) in 2004 in Le Locle/Neuchâtel. CALMA was funded by a £200,000 FDTL award.

Clarke also writes about various topics related to his work. These include contributions to The Csound Book (ed. Richard Boulanger, MIT Press), articles in Perspectives of New Music and Organised Sound and frequent presentations at the International Computer Music Conference. Recently he has published an analysis of Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco in 'Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music' (ed. Mary Simoni, Routledge, 2006). In doing so has he begun developing an 'interactive aural' approach to musical analysis which combines text with computer software and has been described by one reviewer as 'ground-breaking' and ‘revolutionary’.

Research Outputs

Areas for Research Supervision

Composition, including computer music (especially live interactive works)

Interactive Aural approaches to the analysis of music

Development of software for music and music pedagogy (especially using Max/MSP)

Development of algorithms for sound synthesis and processing