Curtis Roads teaches in CREATE, Department of Music, University of California, Santa Barbara. He studied music composition at California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, San Diego (B. A. Summa Cum Laude), and the University of Paris VIII (Ph.D). From 1980 to 1987 he was a researcher in computer music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then taught at the University of Naples "Federico II," Harvard University, Oberlin Conservatory, Les Ateliers UPIC (Paris), and the University of Paris VIII. He has recently led master classes at the Australian National Conservatory (Melbourne) and the Prometeo Laboratorio (Parma), among others. He is co-organizer of international workshops on musical signal processing in Sorrento, Capri, and Santa Barbara (1988,1991,1997,2000). He has served on the composition juries of the Ars Electronica (Linz) and the International Bourges Competition.
Certain of his compositions feature granular and pulsar synthesis, methods he developed for generating sound from acoustical particles. He has recently developed the Creatophone, a system for spatial projection of sound in concert. Another new invention is the Creatovox, an expressive new instrument for virtuoso performance that is based on the synthesis of sound particles. The Creatovox, developed in collaboration with Alberto de Campo, was first demonstrated to the public in March 2000. His composition Clang-Tint (1994) was commissioned by the Japan Ministry of Culture (Bunka-cho) and the Kunitachi College of Music, Tokyo. His music is available on compact discs produced by the MIT Media Laboratory, Wergo, OR, and Mode. A co-founder of the International Computer Music Association in 1979, he was Editor of Computer Music Journal (The MIT Press) from 1978 to 1989, and Associate Editor 1990-2000. His writings include over a hundred monographs, research articles, reports, and reviews. Some of these have been translated and printed in Italian, French, German, Finnish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Recent books include the textbook The Computer Music Tutorial (1996, The MIT Press), Musical Signal Processing (co-editor, 1997, Swets and Zeitlinger, Amsterdam), L'audionumerique (1998, Dunod, Paris), The Computer Music Tutorial - Japanese edition (January 2001, Denki Daigaku Shuppan, Tokyo).
He recently completed a new book entitled Microsound (2002, The MIT Press), which explores the aesthetics and techniques of composition with sound particles.
