Rate My Professor Craig Vear

Craig Vear is Professor in Music and Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, with appointments in both the Department of Music in the Faculty of Arts and the School of Computer Science since January 2023. Prior to this, he was Professor of Digital Performance and Music at De Montfort University from 2011 to 2023, affiliated with the Institute of Creative Technologies and the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Group. From 2000 to 2011, Vear served as lecturer and senior lecturer at the Universities of Exeter, Salford, and London South Bank, and as a research fellow at the University of York. Earlier, between 1992 and 2003, he pursued a career as a professional musician, working with pop acts including Tom Jones, Roddy Frame, and the Wolfgang Press. His band Cousteau sold over 300,000 records, earning gold discs. Vear composed music commissioned by the South Bank Centre, BBC, English National Ballet, the Falkland Islands, and British Antarctic Survey, and received an Olivier Award for his theatre contributions.

Vear's research centres on the intersection of creativity and artificial intelligence from a human-centred viewpoint, examining how computational technologies such as AI, robotics, networks, gaming, and mixed reality transform music scores and musicianship. With nearly three decades of practice-based research in emerging technologies, his work addresses human-AI interaction, innovation processes, creativity, and transdisciplinary collaboration. In 2021, he secured a €2 million European Research Council Consolidator Grant to further Digital Score investigations. Notable publications include editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research (2022), author of The Digital Score: Musicianship, Creativity and Innovation (Routledge, 2019), and editor of The Language of Creative AI (Springer, 2022). He is series editor for Springer's Cultural Computing Series. Recent contributions encompass Jess+: designing embodied AI for interactive music-making (2024) and Creative AI and musicking robots (2021, Frontiers in Robotics and AI).