About

Pip Greasley is an award-winning composer and among the foremost practitioners of experimental electronic music, environmental and thematic performance installations. 

 He created the ground-breaking work 5K Pursuit Opera (1992) for Channel 4 Television. In this interactive digital work a wired-for-sound velodrome enabled racing track cyclists to generate the music and libretto in real time. The BBC Late Show described it as ‘the future of opera’. This highly acclaimed fusion of sound, science and sport was widely recognized for its artistic innovation at the British Film Institute Awards and the US Golden Gate Awards. 

His collaborations include those with choreographers Gideon Avrahami Negev (1978) and Laurie Booth Tower of Sound (1991), writer Sue Townsend Diary of Adrian Mole (1981) for BBC Radio 4, and director Michael Bogdanov, Dracula (1975) for the National Theatre. He has written scores for television (Rapt Anglia Television) and film (Secret Rites Columbia Pictures).

 As an early member of Friends of the Earth, Pip has created over the last four decades, a trilogy of three eco operas including: World Requiem; Planet of the Seas (1974) - earth in melt-down due to global warming; and The Last Broadcast  (1993) – the dangers of electromagnetic waves, especially mobile phones.

 In the mid 90s he set up the music design consultancy sonicxploras to embrace new media and entertainment sectors with drama-based soundscapes for the acclaimed Highland Mystery World and interactive music for an animatronic installation at Alton Towers. With the thematic entertainment industry in mind, sonicxploras developed Total Audio Works to create the sensation of a seamless musical journey, allowing audiences to freely move forwards or backwards in time. Immersive theatre installations at Liseberg Park, Sweden (1999) and Parc Asterix, Paris (2001) won major awards at the themed entertainment industry’s annual Oscars, the THEA Awards , Hollywood, USA. He is currently developing “Flying Opera” as an interpretive arts-science hybrid.

He has created soundtracks for immersive cinema productions such as Astronaut - the score winning ‘Best Use of Immersive Sound’ Award at DomeFest 2008, Chicago, and in the same year worked with the Grammy-winning Nashville Symphony Orchestra on his recording of STARS, voted ‘Best Soundtrack’ at European Festival of Immersive Cinema IFF ’09. More recently he collaborated with Dale Corderoy on the score and sound design for the Franklin Institute’s documentary To Space and Back in 2013 and the National Geographic’s Imax production Asteroid: Mission Extreme.

In 2018, they composed the music for the National Space Centre’s production Planets 360 - a reinterpretation of Holst Planets commissioned by the Royal Astronomical Society, and that year Pip worked with digital artist Ernest Edmonds on Constructs:Conducts, an interactive sound-colour work for the Satosphere, Montreal.

Pip is developing Nuvolari an opera film with director Mark Craig and collaborating with songwriter Bruce Woolley on a multi-platform show Rocket 3.2.1. Pip is a Fellow in Sonic Arts at Loughborough University and Associate Professor at the ETH in Zurich. He was a member of the performance collective Post War Orchestra 2014/16 and tours with his own band Cold War. Since 2021 he has been on the advisory panel of the ‘Future Sound Experience’ for the Ivors Academy.