Biography
Job Title: Associate Professor of Sound Design, Composition and Performance
Courses Taught: BA (Hons) Music (Production)
Specialisms: Electroacoustic Music
Professor Rob Bentall is a composer, performer and researcher working within the electroacoustic music domain. His works, which have been heard across Europe as well as North and South America, hybridise ambient, folk, dance, improvised and experimental music.
He is interested in electronic music composition, genre theory, multi-channel techniques, sound diffusion performance practice and the history of electronic music.
He read for a BMus at the University of Manchester, graduating in 2010 with the P.J. Leonard Prize for electroacoustic composition, and then gained an MMus from the University of Sheffield, supervised by Dr Adrian Moore and supported by a Julian Payne Scholarship. In 2015, Rob completed a DELNI-funded PhD at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, under the supervision of Dr Paul Wilson and Dr Simon Waters, for which he researched genre hybridisation in electroacoustic music composition. In 2012, he was the recipient of a Santander Mobility Scholarship to study with Prof. Rodrigo Cicchelli Velloso at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
He has held artist residencies at the Electronic Music Studios, Stockholm (2013), Visby International Composers Centre, Gotland (2014) and Cryptic Arts / Cove Park (2017). Rob was a finalist for the 2013 Franz Liszt Composition Prize in Weimar, Germany, and the 2014 Oxford/Sennheiser Electronic Music Prize. His article “Methodologies for Genre Hybridisation” was published in leading peer-reviewed electronic music journal Organised Sound.
From 2015-2017, Rob is a Sound and Music International Embedded composer-in-residence with CMMAS Mexico and the Sound.Music.Image Research Centre at the University of Huddersfield. Rob’s current work includes ‘Telian’ (2016) for nyckelharpa and 8-channel sound, and an upcoming immersive audiovisual collaboration with video artist Heather Rose Lander for Glasgow’s biennial Sonica Festival 2017.
Rob teaches cross-pathway modules Electroacoustic Composition and Computer-Based Composition, is a tutor for Specialist Study Music Production III, and offers postgraduate supervision for students on the MMus Creative Musician.
