Profile

Andrew Hugill (b. 1957) is a British composer, writer and researcher whose work crosses music, digital technology, literature and disability. He has written books and articles, created music and digital works, founded academic programmes and research institutes, and worked as an advocate and consultant. His particular interests include sound and listening, neurodivergence, disability, ’pataphysics and the creative possibilities of systems, patterns and constraints.

Hugill is a Professor of Music. His academic career began in the 1980s at Leicester Polytechnic, later De Montfort University, where he founded Music, Technology and Innovation and the Institute of Creative Technologies. He subsequently established Creative Computing at Bath Spa University and the University of Leicester and co-founded Leicester’s Institute for Digital Culture. In 2025 he became Visiting Research Professor in the School of Music at the University of Leeds.

Composition has been a continuous part of his work since childhood. His music has been widely performed and broadcast and has often explored systems, post-minimalism, conceptual approaches and relationships between sound and other forms of knowledge. His recent creative work combines music, digital media, ecology, neurodivergence and alternative ways of listening. Projects have included Spectrum Sounds, commissioned by the BBC and the four UK Arts Councils; Digital Syzygies, in which autistic and d/Deaf musicians collaborated using EEG headsets; and a creative rethinking of the Percy Grainger Society’s digital archive. His ongoing Frog Fizzles project uses 147 frogs as the basis for a collection of miniature living scores.

His books include The Digital Musician, now in its third edition, ’Pataphysics: A Useless Guide and the co-authored Aural Diversity. His research has ranged across electronic music, digital culture, literature, computer science, hearing difference and disability. His realisation of Erik Satie’s Uspud was published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and he has written on subjects as diverse as Raymond Roussel, audio-only games, Ménière’s disease, museum sound and relationships between music and science.

Hugill’s experience of Ménière’s disease, severe hearing loss, tinnitus and diplacusis, together with his diagnosis of autism in 2018, significantly changed the direction of his work. In 2018 he founded Aural Diversity, which brings together research and practice around hearing difference and the many ways in which people listen. His Aural Diversity Infographic is widely used in audiology and acoustics, and his work in this area has developed into wider advocacy and consultancy around disability, accessibility and neurodivergent experience. He has advised organisations in healthcare, education, engineering and the arts.

Alongside his creative and research work, Hugill has contributed extensively to academic leadership and peer review. He has served on international panels for the European Research Council and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and is a National Teaching Fellow and Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.