Tipei, Sever (1943-) | University of Illinois Archives

Sever Tipei (1943- ) was born in Bucharest, Romania on November 1, 1943. He earned degrees in piano performance and composition from the Bucharest Conservatory (now National University of Music at Bucharest) in 1967. In 1971 he began a program in aesthetics at the University of Paris. After he immigrated to the United States in 1972 he began his DMA in composition at the University of Michigan, Tipei graduated in 1978 at which point he applied for and received US citizenship.

After graduating in 1978, Tipei earned a position in the Composition area at the University of Illinois' School of Music. He became a full professor in 1992. In 1993, alongside James Beauchamp, he established the University of Illinois' Computer Music Project. MP1, his program for computer-assisted composition in use between 1973 and 1998, was the first such program to be implemented on a supercomputer ( NCSA 's CRAY X-MP), in 1986. Sever Tipei also had a Faculty Appointment (visiting scientist) at the Argonne National Laboratory between 1994 and 2003.

In collaboration with Hans Kaper, Senior Mathematician (now retired), at Argonne Tipei worked on developing an Environment for Music Composition (EMC), that included software for composition, sound synthesis, automatic music notation, and visualization of music in a virtual environment. Tipei and Kaper have also pursued the sonification of complex scientific data. A more recent project, DISSCO, a Digital Instrument for Sound Synthesis and Composition, available on Github.com represents a unified approach to composition and sound synthesis. In 2021, he retired from the School of Music, but continues to teach courses in informatics as an affiliate faculty member in the School of Information Sciences.