Kenneth Newby
Canadian modern composer

Kenneth Newby

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Canadian modern composer
Gender:
Male
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Birth:
1956(Victoria, Capital Regional District, British Columbia, Canada)
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Biography

Introduction

Kenneth Newby (born 1956) is a Canadian media artist, composer-performer, educator, interaction designer, and audio producer based in British Columbia. He is known for his innovative use of technology in the creation of music, media performances, and installations. He is a Research Associate at the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of British Columbia, and Director of the Flicker Art Collaboratory at Frog Hollow, Mayne Island.

Early life

Newby was born in Victoria, British Columbia.

Career

Newby joined the research faculty in media arts at Simon Fraser University, where he was a member of the Computational Poetics research group with Aleksandra Dulic and Martin Gotfrit. At the University of the Fraser Valley he was Associate Professor in Media Arts., where he studied creative forces in the field of computational art.

Newby created performances and exhibits which integrated new media diffusion techniques and augmented reality systems, and he developed generative systems for the composition and performance of music and visual art.

In the 1990s Newby released several solo albums, including Ecology of Souls in 1993. He also collaborated on recordings with the groups Trance Mission and Lights in a Fat City.

In the 2004 Newby collaborated with the group Gamelan Madu Sari on their album of Javanese music, New Nectar, and later contributed to their live performance installation, "Semar's Journey", in Vancouver.

Newby's recent work is focussed on long-term projects in generative art including the development of the Flicker Computer Assisted Composition system — a computer-aided system for the composition and performance of contemporary classical music; and Becoming World — a project in generative visual art in collaboration with Aleksandra Dulic.

Newby also worked as an interactivity consultant for Pixar Animation Studios, and as a sound artist and audio software developer at Electronic Arts.

Discography

Solo

Year Name Ref
1993 Ecology of Souls
1997/2017 Sirens
1998/2017 Seasonal Round (an opera with libretto and vocal performance by Robert Anthony)
2017 Chambers — Emergence Trilogy volume one
2017 Elegeia — Emergence Trilogy volume two
2017 spectral (golden) lyric — Emergence Trilogy volume three

Trance Mission

Year Name Ref
1993 Trance Mission
1995 Meanwhile...
1996 Head Light

Lights in a Fat City

Year Name Ref
1993 Sound Column
1999 Memory Ground

Other appearances

Year Name Artist Ref
1994 Landing Stephen Kent
1995 The Shirt I Slept In Beth Custer
1996 Halcyon Days w/ Steve Roach & Stephen Kent