Composition, Theory, History & Literature

Robert Wannamaker is a composer, improviser, instrument builder, music theorist, mathematician, and educator.

Rob’s music reflects his interests in the physicality and perception of sound, sonic environments, extended performance techniques, tuning systems, noise, gradual processes, and algorithmic composition. He has written music for diverse instrumental combinations, as well as compositions featuring live electronics, installations works, and recorded electroacoustic and algorithmic music. His works have been performed throughout Europe and North America by the SONOR Ensemble, Ensemble Chronophonie, The Nonsense Company, János Négesy & Päivikki Nykter, Angharad Davies, Barbara Lüneberg, and others.

As an improviser Rob performs on piano—for which he has developed a body of extended techniques—and on The Instrument, a collection of found objects in combination with commercial and homemade signal processing equipment. His solo and ensemble improvisations have been featured at TELIC (Los Angeles), 4862 Voltaire Street (San Diego), Zeitgeist Gallery (Boston), Flywheel (Easthampton), Casa del Popolo (Montreal), and in Toronto at the Music Gallery, the Victory Cafe, Aleph Null, ARRAYMUSIC Studio, Artword Theatre, and elsewhere.

Rob’s scholarly research interests include the application of psychoacoustics to musical analysis, mathematical models of pitch organization, tuning theory, the history and analysis of contemporary music, and relationships between aesthetics in art and in science. He holds a Ph.D. in music composition from the University of California, San Diego where he studied principally with Chaya Czernowin, but also with Roger Reynolds, Gerald Balzano, Charles Curtis and Miller Puckette, among others. He previously studied composition with James Tenney and David Lidov at York University in Toronto.

Rob also holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, where he conducted research on signal processing theory and psychoacoustics. His research with Stanley Lipshitz and John Vanderkooy into the theory and implementation of dithered quantization techniques has made them universal in professional digital audio applications. His methodology for designing psychoacoustically optimal filters for noise-shaping quantization-error feedback is also widely used.

http://www.robertwannamaker.com