Paul Doornbusch

Paul Doornbusch is a composer, researcher, and academic working at the intersection of electroacoustic music, algorithmic composition, media art, and the history and practice of computer music. Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1960, he spent much of the 1990s resident in The Netherlands, where he collaborated with leading new-music performers and developed his practice in combining acoustic instruments with live electronic processing and computer-generated materials.

He is perhaps best known for his reconstruction and documentation of the music played by CSIRAC — the Australian computer now recognised as the first in the world to play music. This project, undertaken with the University of Melbourne and Museum Victoria, is documented in his book The Music of CSIRAC: Australia’s First Computer Music (Common Ground Publishing, 2005) and a paper in the Computer Music Journal (28:1, 2004).

His compositions are described in the Computer Music Journal as work “whose commitment to the technical possibilities afforded by contemporary technology is so closely matched by a compulsion to exploit to the full the expressive potential unleashed thereby” (Richard Barrett, CMJ 30:3, 2006).

Doornbusch is currently Visiting Professor at BNB , Zhuhai, China. He holds a PhD from RMIT University and has held positions at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague, Victoria University of Wellington, and the Australian College of the Arts. He collaborates with Sarah Kenderdine on large-scale immersive media installations. In 2024–2025 he co-curated Musica ex Machina — Machines Thinking Musically at EPFL, Lausanne — an exhibition tracing algorithmic thinking in music from ancient times to artificial intelligence.

His Chronology of Electronic and Computer Music and Related Events (originally published in The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music, 2009) is a comprehensive reference used internationally by researchers and historians.