Curtis Roads (b. 9 May 1951, Cleveland, Ohio) is an American composer, sound artist, computer music theorist, and software developer best known as the pioneer of granular synthesis; he currently teaches "Media Arts and Technology" at The University Of California At Santa Barbara. Roads was the ICMA co-founder (1979) and Computer Music Journal associate editor (1978 to 2000). He published seven books, primarily for The MIT Press, including Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic (2015, Oxford University Press). Some of his accolades include the 2002 Ars Electronica "Distinction Award" for the 455788 cycle, the 2008 ICMC "Best Paper" award for his NSF-funded research on the "dictionary-based pursuit" (DBP) method of sound analysis, the SEAMUS 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award, and ZKM/Südwestrundfunk's Giga-Hertz Prize in 2016.
Roads studied composition at CalArts and the University Of California, San Diego. In 1974, at UCSD's Center For Music Experiment, 23-year-old Curtis created the first-ever practical implementation of "granular synthesis" on a computer. (Theorized in the 1940s and further developed by Iannis Xenakis in the early 1960s, this micro-scale method operates with "grains" of sound, 1 to 100 milliseconds in duration, densely layered in a unified soundform.) He wrote an Algol program called PLFKLANG that could render "sound clouds" with hundreds of thousands of grains, synthesizing a sine wave/band-limited pulse waveform. One composition took several weeks, with over 60 cycles of calculations, data transfers, and conversion via 20 kHz/12-bit mono DAC; Curtis detailed the story in his book 1586934 (2001, The MIT Press). In later years, at UCSB's Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology, Roads consulted on several other granular synthesis programs, including PulsarGenerator, co-developed in 2001 with Alberto De Campo (heard on Florian Hecker's 2006 847031 CD, for instance), and [i]EmissionControl[/i]. Roads explored microtonality in some works, such as Bohlen–Pierce scale intervals in his 1994 Kunitachi College Of Music commission Clang-Tint.
The composer spent several years in Europe, lecturing at Université Paris 8 while working on his PhD thesis under Horacio Vaggione; later, Curtis served as Director of Pedagogy at Les Ateliers UPIC and taught sound synthesis techniques in Italy at the University of Naples Federico II. In the USA, before joining the UCSB faculty, Curtis Roads was an MIT researcher (1980 to 1986) and lectured at Harvard University and The Oberlin Conservatory Of Music.