Scott A. Wyatt

Scott Alan Wyatt (born 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a composer of electroacoustic music. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Music Composition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, having served as Director of the university's Experimental Music Studios for 40 years. Wyatt also served as President of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) from 1989 through 1996, and is the recipient of the 2018 SEAMUS Award.

Wyatt studied classical piano as a child, though in high school began "living a double life of playing keyboards and bass in rock bands," learning to build his own amplifiers and speaker cabinets as his family did not have the money to afford them. While an avid enthusiast of both technology and music, he was only vaguely aware of synthesizers through their occasional appearance in the commercial music industry. As a freshman studying music education and piano performance at West Chester University in 1970, Wyatt had access to a new Moog Series 900 synthesizer, though it did not have a user manual. Due to his experience with building his own electronic music equipment and performing in bands, Wyatt was able to fully explore the capabilities of the instrument and write a manual for West Chester faculty and students to use. It was during this time that Wyatt came to know the music of composers such as Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Edgard Varèse, and Iannis Xenakis, and was immediately drawn to it. This led him to seek composition lessons under John Melby and Larry Nelson.

After graduating from West Chester University, Wyatt was admitted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1974 as a graduate student, reuniting with and once again studying under John Melby (who had joined the university's composition division faculty the previous year). Wyatt was also a student of Herbert Brün, Ben Johnston, Salvatore Martirano, and Paul Zonn. Wyatt was quickly hired on as a lecturer the following year, teaching music theory, aural skills, and an electronic music course. He also served that year as co-director of the Experimental Music Studios alongside faculty member James Beauchamp, assuming sole directorship in 1976. Wyatt would continue to direct the Experimental Music Studios until 2016.

In addition to his duties at the University of Illinois, Wyatt has been an active figure in the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), serving as its President from 1989 through 1996 and on its Board of Directors until 2016.

Wyatt describes his compositional approach as "gestural", in that he constructs linear motives that allow "the listener a desired opportunity to discover the interplay and development of molded sonic events without the interference of pitch as the primary factor." He asserts that clarity in motivic gestures and their evolutionary development enhances the drive, direction, and drama of a piece. While many of his early electroacoustic works employ sounds derived from synthesizers such as those developed by Moog and Buchla, Wyatt has since shifted to the musique concrète approach of utilizing found sounds. Wyatt records all of his sonic material in a studio in order to have complete control over the sculpting process, finding the exploration of the inherent gestural potential of a sound "revealing" and "exciting". With regard to spatialization, Wyatt opts for a manual approach to achieve effective, convincing translations — "the perceived movement of the location of a sound source" — across a multichannel field, finding it easier to emphasize such movement than by using multichannel panner utilities. He strongly feels that sonic entities that move must at first imply motion, and that it is the composer/engineer's responsibility to ensure that the translation of sounds along with the characteristics of their host environments remain at all times believable.

Wyatt has been the recipient of many awards and honors throughout his career. He was one of the winning participants of the 1978 International Society for Contemporary Music National Composers Competition, the 1979 National Flute Association Composition Competition, and the 1979 Concorso Internazionale Luigi Russolo Composition Competition. He won the International Confederation of Electro-Acoustic Music GRAND PRIZE in the 1984 International Electro-Acoustic Music Competition in Bourges, France, and emerged as a finalist in the 1989 Bourges Competition. Wyatt has also received recognition and funding for advancements in the field of electroacoustic music composition, including an Arnold Beckman Research Award in 1990 for the development of digital timescaling applications, and various grants from 1996 through 2011 for the development of an eight-channel sound diffusion methodology. In 2008, he was awarded a Fine and Applied Arts Creative Research Award for the production of Risky Business: a tribute to Nikola Tesla, a composition featuring two 900,000-volt Tesla Coils. He has also successfully pursued many university grants for digital image processing, a 1994 Educational Technologies Assistance Grant, and several university-sponsored special projects grants for course development. On 7 December 2017, SEAMUS announced that Scott Wyatt will be honored with the 2018 SEAMUS Award, an accolade that "acknowledges the important contributions of its recipients to the field of electro-acoustic music."