Skip to content

Biography

David Worrall

David Worrall, PhD

 

Vernissage of The Network Sonification.

 

David Worrall and Udo Rink.

 

David Worrall is an experimental composer and research scientist, currently Professor and Chair of the Audio Arts and Acoustics Department at Columbia College Chicago. Before moving to Chicago, he conducted research as a member of the Experimental Audio Research group at the of the International Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen in Erlangen, Germany where worked on the sonification of biomedical signals and network data for monitoring purposes. In addition to an ongoing relationship with Fraunhofer IIS, he is also and an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the School of Music at The Australian National University (ANU).

David Worrall was born in Australia, studied music, philosophy and mathematics at the Universities of Sydney and Adelaide; composition with Peter Sculthorpe, Ross Edwards, Richard Meale and Tristram Cary. His Phd was on information sonification.

Dr Worrall established and became the Foundation Head of the Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology (ACAT) at the ANU in 1989, a position he held for over a decade. During that time ACAT offered the first Australian postgraduate degrees in Electronic Arts. He has won various awards and held composition and research fellowship positions in Australia, UK, Europe and the USA.

He has been actively involved in the establishment and governance of a number of organizations, including the Electronic Music Foundation (USA), the Music Council of Australia (which made him an Honorary Life Member) the Australasian Computer Music Association and the International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD) of which he is currently its elected President. He is a Regional Editor for the journal Organised Sound (Cambridge University Press) for which recently co-edited an issue on Sonification.

His creative practice encompasses instrumental and electroacoustic composition, sound poetry, sound and multimedia/polymedia installations including the design and construction of portable event theatres, the development of software frameworks for music composition, text transformation and the sonification of information in large or high-frequency multivariate datasets.