Richard Beaudoin

Richard Beaudoin (born October 10, 1975) is an American composer of contemporary music. His music and writings explore compositional uses of expressive timing, or microtiming.

Beaudoin was born in North Attleborough, Massachusetts. He graduated from North Attleborough High School in 1993, studied privately with bassist Mibbit Threats, and enrolled at Amherst College in 1993 where he remained for three years, studying with Lewis Spratlan.

In 1996, he withdrew from Amherst College and spent a year living in Mortlake, near London, studying composition privately with Michael Finnissy. He returned to Amherst College and graduated summa cum laude in 1998. He was a MacDowell Colony Fellow in January 1999.

In 2000, Beaudoin returned to London and earned his M.Mus. in Music Composition from London's Royal Academy of Music in 2002, studying again with Michael Finnissy. He returned to the United States and, in 2008, earned his Ph.D. in Composition and Music Theory from Brandeis University, studying composition with David Rakowski and Martin Boykan, and theory with Eric Chafe.

While still a Ph.D. student at Brandeis, he held two visiting professorships at Amherst College: as Joseph A. and Grace W. Valentine Visiting Professor of Music at Amherst College (2005–06) and as Visiting Professor of Music (2007). Since earning his Ph.D., he has taught composition and theory at Harvard University, first as Lecturer on Music (2008–11) and then as Preceptor in Music (2011–present).

Beaudoin's most widely performed works are those related to expressive timing, or microtiming. This process, which he developed in 2009 with the Swiss musicologist Olivier Senn, is based on millisecond-level microtemporal analyses of recorded performances. The timing measurements of every sound in a given recording are used to create a detailed transcription of the recording in musical notation, often in elongation.

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