Åke Parmerud (born 24 July 1953) is a Swedish composer, musician, and multimedia artist noted for his acoustic and electronic works, which have been performed mostly in Europe, Mexico, and Canada.
He also studied with electronic-music pioneer Lars Gunnar Bodin Electronic Music Studio (EMS) in Stockholm (Peterson 2001; Parmerud n.d.).
During the late 1980s and 1990s he worked extensively together with composer Anders Blomqvist, with whom he wrote the music for a two-hour documentary on Greta Garbo, which in turn produced Strings and Shadows, in which the harp's sounds are transformed electronically (Peterson 2001).
In 1997, “Grains of Voices” was performed on United Nations Day at the organization's New York headquarters (Parmerud n.d.; Anon.
At the Other Minds Festival he performed a piece called "La vie mécanique" ("The Mechanical Life") generated entirely from machine sounds.
He has designed concerts and has been the artistic director of large indoor and outdoor audio-visual events (Parmerud n.d.; Anon.
He founded AudioTechture with Olle Niklasson, a company which specializes in acoustic interior design from homes to public spaces.
Works such as “The Fire Inside,” “The Living Room” and “Lost Angel” have been shown in Berlin, Paris, Mexico City, Leon, Gothenburg and Reykjavík (Anon.
A work called the “Seventh Sense” was developed with Canadian choreographer Mireille Leblanc (Parmerud n.d.; Anon.
This includes indigenous chants, opera, protests, improvisation, prayer and recordings from television, radio and other media, as well as poetry from Hemingway, Hesse, and Joyce.
More recent awards include the Gigahertz Preis in Germany in 2008 and the Qwartz Pierre Shaeffer Prize in France in 2009 (Anon.