Biography

(long version)

Dr Aki Pasoulas is a composer and a Reader in Music at the University of Kent. He is the Director of MAAST (Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre), Chief Examiner and the Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded research project ‘A Sonic Palimpsest: Revisiting Chatham Historic Dockyards’. Co-Investigator for the research project ‘Liminal Spaces’. He served as Director of Education, Director Music Programmes, deputy Director of Research and Senior Tutor.

He holds a PhD on timescale perception in electroacoustic music, and he taught at universities in London including City, Middlesex, and the University of the Arts. His doctoral research, supervised by Denis Smalley at City University London and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), investigated the listener’s experience and interpretation of time passing and the interrelationships among timescales in electroacoustic music. Research interests include electroacoustic music, particularly acousmatic music; time and timescale perception; psychoacoustics and sound perception; spatial sound; and soundscape ecology, especially in relation to listening psychology. He is a board member of the UK and Ireland Soundscape Community (UKISC).

Aki originally studied and worked as a graphic designer, before embarking on music studies at the Open University and then at Goldsmiths College, University of London, from where he graduated with first class honours. His BMus concentrated on contemporary art music, composition and ethnomusicology. He subsequently gained a distinction for his master’s degree at Goldsmiths, specialising in electroacoustics.

Throughout his creative contact with music he organised and performed with diverse ensembles, with material ranging from minimalism and post-punk to experimental music with vocal utterances, acoustic instruments and found objects, electroacoustic improvisations, mixed works, and acousmatic compositions. Aki wrote many pieces for various combinations of instruments, voice, recorded and electronic sound, lyrics for many songs, and a number of poems. He composed music for the theatre and for short animation films, and took part in many concerts worldwide.

Aki was a SAM (former SPNM) shortlisted composer for 2008-2011. His compositions received honorable mentions and were shortlisted at international composition competitions such as Métamorphoses 2008 in Belgium, and Concours Internationaux 2009 (Musiques Electroacoustiques et Arts Electroniques) in France.

His works have been selected at key peer-reviewed events including the ICMC conferences in Montreal, New York, Limerick, Huddersfield, Ljubljana, and Shanghai, the SMC in Porto and Limassol, the international Festival Synthèse in Bourges, France, the Sonoimágenes international acousmatic and multimedia festival in Buenos Aires, the SAW electroacoustic symposium in Cardiff, the ISCM World New Music Days festival in Sydney, the Festival Futura of acousmatic art in Crest, France, the MANTIS festival at Manchester, the WFAE international conference on acoustic ecology in Corfu, the International Exhibition at the BYTE Gallery in Lexington USA, the ISSTA conference in Ireland, the CIME/ICEM General Assembly in Beijing, the Convergence conference at De Montfort in Leicester, and the EMUFest international electroacoustic music festival in Rome. (For a comprehensive list see Performances.)

A major composition was selected for the ICMC 2010 CD published by ICMA, and concerts dedicated to Aki’s music took place in Vienna in 2010 and 2013. His music is housed in the Phonothèque and Mnémothèque of the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges (IMEB) in the National Library of France.