“Intangibles in Music”

Roger Dean is research Professor of Sonic Communication, at MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney, since May 2007. He has always been a musician involved in creative work, while pursuing a changing range of research endeavours. He is now researching music computation and cognition, following extensive earlier work in musicology.

He trained in biochemistry at Cambridge University, UK and received his PhD for work at Strangeways Research Laboratory, Cambridge. He subsequently worked at University College, London, then for the Medical Research Council and from 1979 was at Brunel University, West London - a pioneering British technological and scientific university. From Brunel, Roger was awarded a higher doctorate, DSc, in 1984, and was appointed there as an Associate Professor in 1979 and a full Professor of Cell Biology at the early age of 35. His biological publications include more than 280 primary research articles, and 5 edited and four authored books. He has worked in many countries including USA, France, Norway, Japan, Switzerland and in 1984 he spent 3 months at Sydney University. Roger became Foundation Executive Director of the autonomous Heart Research Institute Ltd, in Sydney, in December 1988, and an Australian citizen in 1992. He became Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra in early 2002, and completed his 5-year term in 2007, choosing to return to full time research at the University of Western Sydney.

Professor Dean has not only an impressive academic background, but also has been a successful institution builder. Under his 13-year leadership (from 1988-2002) The Heart Research Institute became one of the most productive research institutions in Australia with an unsurpassed record of knowledge generation, dissemination and commercialisation. Partly as a result of his guidance the Heart Research Institute is recognised as a major contributor in its field, with international standing. Like the public universities in Australia the Heart Research Institute operates under extreme financial stringencies so that Professor Dean was confident to take up the significant challenge to build on the University of Canberra’s achievements to develop its many strengths.

Roger is also an internationally established musical composer/improviser and researcher and directs the sound and new media performance and creative ensemble austraLYSIS, which is now primarily a computer-interactive electroacoustic group, at the cutting-edge of sonic and intermedia style and technique. He has worked with avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Krystof Penderecki, jazz musicians such as Graham Collier, Ted Curson, and Ken Wheeler, anti-idiomatic improvisers such as Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, as well as with most of the leading figures in new music in Australia. He has made more than 30 commercial recordings released all over the world, performed in more than 30 countries, and he has composed to commissions for chamber groups (such as the Australian Chamber Orchestra), in computer music, and for improvising ensembles. His most recent cd release (2007), is a recording he made as pianist with Graham Collier's 'all-star' Hoarded Dreams Band at a festival in 1983 (Cuneiform Records, USA, Rune 252).

He has published five research books on musical improvisation, and on hypermedia, the most recent being ‘Hyperimprovisation’, on computer-interactive sound improvisation (A-R Editions, USA , 2003), and 'Sounds from the Corner'. on Australian jazz on CD (Australian Music Centre, Sydney, 2005); and more than 80 related substantive research articles in humanities. Roger earned a higher doctorate in this field (DLitt, 2001, also from Brunel University, UK). He created the Sonic Communications Research Group at UC in 2004. His creative arts activities are represented on the austraLYSIS web site. He is now part of the Music, Sound and Action group at MARCS Auditory Laboratories, UWS. 

Because of his creative involvement both with science and the arts, Roger has several times been described as one of Australia's 'renaissance men' (for example in a Sydney Morning Herald article by John Clare, June 2005). His many media appearances have included an extended interview with Margaret Throsby on his dual life; an interview with Kerri-Anne Kennerley on the tv 'Midday Show'; a news interview on Australian television concerning exciting progress at the Heart Research Institute towards a drug for 'flushing out fats' from the diseased vessel wall; and an extended interview on BBC in the UK on new developments in computer interactive improvisation in the context of a programme of his music; and many comments and discussions about the importance and future of University Education in Australia. He was a recipient of the Commonwealth Centenary Medal in 2003. In 2004 Roger was elected an honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA). In June 2007 he became the Chair of the Australian Music Centre, Australia’s key organization for the promotion of new art music, from composition to computational to improvised.