STEPHEN INGHAM
Image of Stephen Ingham’s sound piece derived from scanned textures of the Paphos ancient theatre: Akou, 2006. Duration 12.57 minutes. From the exhibition Travellers from Australia, exhibited at the Pailia Ilektriki, Ktima Pafos, Cyprus, 2-15 October, as part of the official program of the Pafos2017 European Capital of Culture. Photo: Shelley Webster 2017.
Artist Statement
For the 2006 project Sonic architectures: mapping the ancient theatre in image and sound Stephen Ingham took the scanned rubbings of the theatre textures as a starting point, to create sound textures through merging innovative computer programs with musical thinking. He composed Akou in 2006. While the fields of electroacoustic composition and spatialised sound diffusion are not in themselves new, the composer’s ability to harness recent digital technologies to generate and spatially diffuse sound output from vast quantities of scanned (or otherwise derived) data - sonification - has emerged as an exciting field of creative investigation.
Biography
Stephen Ingham has had a varied career as a composer, music critic and academic. Born in London, Stephen obtained Honours degrees in both Chemistry and Music at the University of York, UK with further studies at the University of Indiana and at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg. As a Lecturer in Music at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne he established and directed the Hopkins Studio for Electroacoustic and Computer Music. Widely recognised for his innovative electronic and analogue compositions that often address visual images, in 2001 and 2003 he was a guest composer at the fifth International Forum for Contemporary Piano Music in Heilbronn, Germany, and in the following year he was appointed as a guest professor in composition at the Musikhogskolan in Piteå, Sweden. Since 1993, he has lived and worked in Australia, first at the University of Melbourne and from 1998-2008 as Associate Professor in the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. He is now an independent composer living in Melbourne.