Richard Orton

In 1968 he co-founded the electronic music ensemble Gentle Fire along with Hugh Davies.

He was a co-founder of the Composers Desktop Project, which placed affordable sound technologies on the individual composer's desk, and developed musical composition software, which formed part of the CDP system.

In the early 1980s, with his colleague Dr. Ross Kirk from the Department of Electronics at York, he started work on the concept of Music Technology as an academic discipline.

In 1992 he began working on his algorithmic composition language, Tabula Vigilans, designed for real-time performance.

[4] As well as this, he contributed teaching materials to the Open University in its early days and wrote "Electronic Music for Schools", published in 1981.