Sean Ferguson

regular Member

McGill University

Music Composition Area, Department of Music Research, Schulich School of Music

https://www.mcgill.ca/music/sean-alastair-ferguson

RA4 RA1 RA3

Instrumental and mixed composition | computer-assisted composition | traditional music of Ireland | artistic applications of music technology (digital signal processing | gestural controllers for digital musical instruments | real time computer interaction | etc.) | musical applications of symbolic computation | incorporating psychoacoustics and music cognition into the compositional process.

Sean Ferguson was born in the remote Northern Alberta community of Fort Vermilion. He has lived in Montreal since 1990, where he studied composition at McGill University. He teaches composition and co-directs the Digital Composition Studios. He began his second term as Dean of the Schulich School of Music in 2022, having previously served as Dean from 2011-16. He was Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) from 2009-2011 and Associate Director (Artistic) of CIRMMT from 2006-09. From 1997-2001 he was a counsellor of the Société québécoise de recherche en musique, for whom he was the artistic coordinator of three different week-long festivals of Quebec music. From 1999-2009 he was a member of the artistic committee of the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec. His fascination with the mechanics of perception has led him to carry out extensive research in psychoacoustics and to incorporate these findings into his compositional language. The computational demands of these psychoacoustic models have also sparked his interest in computer-assisted composition.