Oliver Larkin is a musician and programmer who has been working at the
Music Research Centre since January 2009. His primary interests are DSP for creative audio synthesis/processing applications and novel musical interfaces.
At the MRC he teaches the Digital Audio Programming and Interfacing modules on the MA Music Technology course, as well as developing software for research projects and artist collaborations, and maintaining the centre's computing facilities.
Oliver graduated from Middlesex University in 2006 with a BSC in Sonic Arts (first class honours). Before this he spent an internship year at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris and at Music production studios in London. Between 2007 and 2008 he worked as a research assistant and taught Music Technology at The
Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music lab (ICSRiM) at the University of Leeds. At Leeds he worked on
i-Maestro which was a three-year EC-IST research project with nine European partner institutions. The goal of the project was to research and develop new technology for music pedagogy and the ICSRiM team focused on the analysis of bowed string instrument performance using 3D motion capture. They developed a
real-time interface to a VICON motion capture system which integrated video, audio, sensor and motion data capture and reported various analyses of the performance using multimodal feedback.
Outside of the institutions that he has worked in, Oliver develops his own
audio plugins which have been featured in international music technology publications, and are used by many successful recording artists. In 2008, his "preset interpolation" software
pMix won the second prize in the
LOMUS International music software competition. Oliver works extensively with
Cycling 74's Max MSP/Jitter software and C++, and is a regular contributor to the Max MSP community forum.