Simon Emmerson is an electroacoustic music composer working mostly with live electronics. He was born in Wolverhampton, UK, on 15 September 1950. Since November 2004 Emmerson has been professor in music technology and innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester, following 28 years as director of the Electroacoustic Music studios at City University, London. His catalogue now spans 35 years, including commissions for Intermodulation, Singcircle, Option Band, Lontano, Jane Manning, Philip Mead, Jane Chapman amongst many others. He has also completed purely electroacoustic commissions from the IMEB, the GRM and the Inventionen Festival. He was a first prize winner at the Bourges Electroacoustic Awards in 1985 for his work Time Past IV. He contributed to and edited The Language of Electroacoustic Music in 1986 and Music, Electronic Media and Culture. His book Living Electronic Music was published by Ashgate in 2007, also two solo CDs from Sargasso in 2007 and 2008. He was founder secretary of the Electroacoustic Music Association of Great Britain in 1979, and served on the board of Sonic Arts Network from its inception until 2004. From 2008 to 2012 he was a member of the board of trustees of its successor organisation 'Sound and Music'. In 2009–2010 he was DAAD Edgar Varese Visiting Professor at the Technische Universität Berlin.
Recordings
Dreams, Memories and Landscapes
Digswell Duets
Cultures électroniques 15
Spaces and Places
Points and Pathways
For Violin and Electronics
Publications
The Language of Electroacoustic Music
Music, Electronic Media and Culture
Living Electronic Music
Expanding the Horizon of Electroacoustic Music Analysis
The Routledge Research Companion to Electronic Music: Reaching out with Technology
'‘Live' versus 'real-time'’, Contemporary Music Review 10 : pp. 95–101
'‘Local/field': towards a typology of live electroacoustic music', International Computer Music Conference Aarhus, September 1994, reprinted in Journal of Electroacoustic Music 9: pp. 10–13
‘Combining the acoustic and the digital: music for instruments and computers or pre-recorded sound’, in Roger T. Dean, The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music, OUP, 2009, pp. 167–188
‘Music Imagination Technology’, Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference Huddersfield, July–August 2011, San Francisco: ICMA, pp. 365–372
‘Local/Field and beyond. The scale of spaces’ in Martha Brech and Ralph Paland eds., Kompositionen für hörbaren Raum/Compositions for audible space, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015, pp. 13–26
‘Feeling Sound', in Nicholas Reyland, Rebecca Thumpston eds., Music Analysis and the Body: Experiments, Explorations and Embodiments, Leuven Studies in Musicology 6. Leuven: Peeters, 2018, pp. 191-208
‘Playing the Inner Ear: Performing the Imagination’, in Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, Mads Walther-Hansen, and Martin Knakkergaard eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, Volume 2, New York: OUP, 2019, pp. 259–278
Netaudio London & Sound and Music present: Perspectives on Digital Music – 12 interviews with leading practitioners. Simon Emmerson – ‘The future of live computer music’. YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78z1_8J8oVE
‘Electroacoustics – The Art of The Next Decade’, The Second Call – contemporary music magazine, Netherlands; Jan. 1984, #1, pp. 21–22. Translation to Russian. http://dvmusic.ru/index/articles/one/full/1804