Peter Williams

Background

About Peter Williams

I realised, whilst still at school, that I had a natural propensity towards science. This led me to study Materials Science and Engineering at Sheffield University - one of the best universities in the U.K. During this time, my innate love of music transformed itself into an unquenchable passion. When I graduated I took a twenty-five-year hiatus, during which I taught myself to play the bass guitar, then the double bass, then the flute. I learned everything I could about the composition, performance and engineering of music. I turned this into a living, playing funk, rock, R&B, pop and ultimately jazz. I appeared on stages and studios throughout Europe and even spent three years touring with Scandinavia’s largest circus. After releasing numerous albums as producer, performer and composer and having Woody Allen use one of my recordings for Midnight in Paris, which went on to win an Oscar and a Grammy, I found myself settled in Denmark. Having achieved most of my musical ambitions, and harbouring a natural desire to care for my new Copenhagen based family, I decided to return to academic study to refresh my technical skills and knowledge base, and to search for a new career path that might combine my love of technology and my creative urges. Sound and Music Computing at Aalborg University presented the perfect opportunity to not only learn about the latest methods in subjects such as Machine Learning, Signal Analysis, Prototyping and Fabrication, but to identify their uses and apply them in real life. In just two years I went from musician, to student, to a published researcher in industry proceedings, a presenter at an international conference and even a competitor at Georgia Technological College, where I built, transported and performed on a two-meter-long digitally augmented medieval instrument. My appetite for development, research and evaluation in sound related Human Computer Interaction has been whetted, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for me.