I am Rui Penha, a composer / media artist / performer / researcher / thinker / tinkerer / professor / father of two currently living in Porto, Portugal: welcome to my website!
I was once an active member of online communities around my subjects of interest (namely composition and music technology), and this website was once updated regularly to reflect that. In recent years, though, I became a believer in the specific power of unmediated communities and, slowly but surely, I cancelled or abandoned all of my online social network accounts. This website was thus abandoned for years.
I am an Associate Professor of Composition (and currently Vice-President for Artistic Research) at ESMAE and an active member of the contemporary music scene in Porto, and I am perfectly happy with how fulfilling those communities are. However, I recently felt the need to start an archive of previous works, mainly for myself but also to provide friends, colleagues and students with documentation on some of my older pieces, software and essays.
This website will slowly be filled with details on those works, providing a reference that is easily accessible by anyone. I am a firm believer in sharing culture and most of the contents here can be freely used, under CC BY-SA 4.0, provided that there is a reference to the source and a similar open sharing of the results. I always appreciate when people get in touch — rui[at]ruipenha[dot]pt — to share their ideas and results based on my work, but please do not feel obliged to do so if you don’t feel like it.
If you came here looking for my biographical note or official photo, you can find them both below. My full academic CV is available here.
Short biography
Composer, media artist, and performer of electroacoustic music, Rui Penha was born in Porto in 1981. He completed his PhD in Music (Composition) at the University of Aveiro. His music is regularly recorded and played in festivals and concert halls around Europe and North America, by musicians such as Arditti Quartet, Peter Evans, Remix Ensemble, Sond’Ar-te Electric Ensemble or the Gulbenkian Orchestra. He was a founder and curator of Digitópia (Casa da Música, Porto) and has a deep interest on the relationship between music and its technology. His recent production includes interfaces for musical expression, sound spatialisation software, interactive installations, musical robots, autonomous improvisers, and educational software. More recently, Rui has focused his attention on the problems of defining and guiding artistic research. He taught at several Portuguese institutions, in both music, art and engineering faculties, and is currently an associate professor at ESMAE and integrated researcher at CESEM.