Biography

Minard was born in Montreal

Montreal

Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. He began his studies of composition at the University of Ontario, then at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal, studying under Gilles Tremblay

Gilles Tremblay

Gilles Tremblay, is a Canadian composer. He studied at the Conservatories of Montreal and Paris , where his teachers including Olivier Messiaen , Yvonne Loriod , and Maurice Martenot . He also attended Stockhausen's summer courses at Darmstadt, where he became interested in electro-acoustic...

. He then continued his studies with John Rea

John Rea (composer)

John Rea is a Montreal-based composer who notably won the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music in both 1981 and 1992. He obtained his Bachelors degree at Wayne State University , his Master of Music degree at the University of Toronto , and his PhD at Princeton University. His children's opera...

 at McGill University

McGill University

Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...

. He was a member of the music design and performance ensemble Sonde from 1979 to 1988. In 1988 he undertook doctoral studies in environmental music at the University of Paris VIII studying under composer Horacio Vaggione

Horacio Vaggione

Horacio Vaggione is an electro-acoustic and musique concrète composer who specializes in micromontage, granular synthesis, and thus microsound and whose pieces often are for performer and computer-generated tape...

. From 1992 to 1996 he taught at the studio for electronic music at the TU Berlin. Since 1997, he has been Professor of Electro-Acoustic Composition at the Hochschule für Musik FRANZ LISZT

Liszt School of Music Weimar

The Liszt School of Music Weimar is a college of music in Weimar, Germany.-The Hochschule:...

 and the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar

Weimar

Weimar is a city in Germany famous for its cultural heritage. It is located in the federal state of Thuringia , north of the Thüringer Wald, east of Erfurt, and southwest of Halle and Leipzig. Its current population is approximately 65,000. The oldest record of the city dates from the year 899...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

.

Artistic Work

Minard has concentrated his work on electro-acoustic composition and sound installations in public since the early 1980s. One primary area of interest in his work is dealing with acoustic space in an urban world increasingly polluted with noise

Noise

In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound. In both analog and digital electronics, noise is random unwanted perturbation to a wanted signal; it is called noise as a generalisation of the acoustic noise heard when listening to a weak radio transmission with significant electrical noise...

, and redefining the concept of functional music in that context. He points out that, with the exception of concert halls, theaters and some conference rooms, the ear is rarely a factor in the planning and design of architecture

Architecture

Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...

 and urban infrastructure. Minard describes two different strategies of "composing space" which enters into dialogue with the architectural and acoustic environment: conditioning and articulation. Conditioning he considers to be analogous to laying a mantle of color over a space in the visual realm. Articulation refers to the addition of the dimension of time to architecture using sound; the movement of sound articulates and decorates the space. Some examples of his work utilizing these principles include; Music for Passageways (1985), Sound Catchers (1991), Silent Music (1994), Still / Life (1996), Intermezzo (1999), Sound Bits (2002), Outside In (2006) and Klangzug (2010).

External links

• Official website of Robin Minard