James Beauchamp received degrees of Bachelor of Science and Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1960 and 1961 and a Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1965. Beauchamp developed one of the first voltage-controlled electronic music synthesizers, the Harmonic Tone Generator, as a graduate student in Electrical Engineering at the UIUC during 1962-64, advised by UIUC music professor Lejaren Hiller, Then in 1965 he joined the EE faculty at the UIUC. During 1968-69 he took a leave of absence to be a Research Associate at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 1969 he returned to UIUC and assumed a joint appointment in Music and Electrical and Computer Engineering. At UIUC he served as director of the School of Music's Experimental Music Studio (1969-73), the PLACOMP Music Synthesizer Project (1973-81), and the Computer Music Project (1984-93).
He is a Fellow of both the Audio Engineering Society of America (AES) and the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and was chair of the ASA's Technical Committee on Musical Acoustics (TCMU) during 2005-2008. He was a coeditor and an author of Music by Computers (Wiley, 1969) and editor and an author of Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception of Musical Sounds (Springer, 2007). He was president (1981-83) and member of the Board of Directors (1980-83, 1986-93) of the International Computer Music Association (ICMA) and co-hosted International Computer Music Conferences (ICMCs) at the UIUC School of Music in 1975 and 1987.
In 1988 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford. During 1994-95 he was a visiting researcher at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination in Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, France.
During the 70's, 80's, and 90's he produced over 30 concerts of electronic and computer music at the UIUC, and he has published numerous articles in professonal journals (click here to see PUBLICATIONS) on computer music synthesis and analysis, musical acoustics, and audio. He is primary author/developer of the sound synthesis software package Music 4C and the sound analysis/synthesis package SNDAN, both for Linux and Macintosh computers.
During 1969-1997 he regularly taught courses in musical acoustics and computer music for the UIUC School of Music as well as courses in electronic music synthesis and audio for the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UIUC. In 1997 he retired from the UIUC, continuing his affiliation with it as Professor Emeritus. His current research interests are in developing sound analysis algorithms, new sound synthesis models, in the perceptual effects of musical sound parameter modifications, and automatic music transcription and instrument voice separation. He is an amateur performer of the trumpet and the piano.
Click here to go to James Beauchamp's Home Page
last update: 11/18/2015