Manuel Rocha

Manuel Rocha Iturbide (born 1963 in Mexico City) is a Mexican composer and sound artist. Manuel Rocha Iturbide was born in 1963 in Mexico City. He started his musical studies when he was 13 years old. In 1983, after studying musical pedagogy in Lyon, France for one year, he decided to start a career as composer at the Escuela Nacional de Musica of the University of Mexico. The extremely academic and traditional studies of that institution led him to explore different creative ways beyond instrumental music, so he practiced photography at "Taller de los Lunes", a workshop organized by Mexican digital photography pioneer Pedro Meyer. In 1988 he started using video work. In 1989 he realized his first sound sculpture at the milestone exhibition "14 artists around Joseph Beuyce" in Mexico City, with important Mexican artists from his generation such as Gabriel Orozco. In 1989, Rocha Iturbide traveled to Mills College in the US, to pursue an MFA in electronic music. There, he composed "Frost Clear", a piece for amplified refrigerator, double bass and electronic sounds which he has played through the years at different important festivals such as the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival in 2006. In 1991, Rocha Iturbide traveled to France where he studied and worked as a researcher at IRCAM, and where he pursued his doctoral thesis on granular synthesis and quantum mechanics in relation to sound from 1992 to 1999. In these years, he worked with Curtis Roads and Barry Truax, two of the most important pioneers on granular synthesis computer music techniques. In 1999 the president of the jury of his doctoral thesis defense was Jean Claude Risset. The name of his thesis was "The granular synthesis techniques".