Introduction

I am a British composer, writer and researcher whose work has moved between music, digital technology, literature, disability and interdisciplinary inquiry. I have written books and articles, made music and digital works, founded academic programmes and research institutes, and worked increasingly in advocacy and consultancy. Running through much of this are long-standing interests in systems, listening, pattern and constraint, alongside more particular fascinations with ’pataphysics, neurodivergence and frogs.

I began composing at the age of eleven, influenced in my teens by the avant-garde music, art and literature I was discovering. During the 1980s and 1990s my music became associated with post-minimalism and conceptual experimentation. Alongside composition, my writing has ranged across music and literature, computer science, digital culture, ’pataphysics, disability and listening.

My academic career began in Performing Arts: Music at Leicester Polytechnic. In 1997 I founded Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University, followed in 2005 by the Institute of Creative Technologies. I established Creative Computing at Bath Spa University in 2013 and at the University of Leicester in 2018, and in 2022 co-founded Leicester’s Institute for Digital Culture. I retired from full-time academic work in 2024 and became Visiting Research Professor of Music at the University of Leeds in 2025.

In 2009, Ménière's Disease caused severe hearing loss, tinnitus and diplacusis. I was diagnosed autistic in 2018. These experiences changed my understanding of listening and perception and increasingly became part of my artistic and scholarly work. They also led to my founding the Aural Diversity project, which explores hearing difference and the many ways in which people listen, and to wider work in disability and neurodivergence advocacy and consultancy. I also write Autistic Professor, where I reflect on autism from lived experience.

I was born in Chichester in 1957. As a child I developed enduring interests in wildlife, music and, later, computers. Looking back, much of what I have done since seems less like a succession of different careers than different ways of pursuing those early fascinations: making things, investigating systems, crossing disciplinary boundaries and trying to understand how differently people can experience the world.

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