Profiles
Christopher Chong - http://www.MajorC.co.uk/
Composer
Programmer
MAX/MSP - Logic - Music Technology tutoring - please email for details :)
After leaving the Royal College of Music JD in London, Christopher attended the Univerisity of Nottingham where he attained his BA in Music pursuing research into narrative roles of audio in new media including video games and interactive fiction. In 2007 he left to continue.
Christopher participates in a variety of musical activities including percussion performance in the orchestra and Big Band conducting. In September 2008 his musical 'Death in D Minor' co-written with composer/programmer Johnny Stormonth-Darling was premiered at the Queen's Film Theatre as a film directed by Master's degree student Martin Bolton and received the 'Best Local Film' at the Yellow Fever International Film Festival. Christopher recently won the Shameless Composition Competition held at the 15th annual Exposures Film Festival. His recent composition and sound design work with Haydn Butler on 'Furnace Four' was premiered in June 2009 at the Edinburgh Film Festival as part of the UK Film Council's 'Life is Short' Screening and will be showing again in London October 2009.
Christopher was accepted into the Screen Music Network for excellence in composition for film in January 2008. Membership is auditioned by a panel of some of the best respected composers in the UK including David Burnand and Rodney Newton.
Implementing scratch-DJ techniques into his work where appropriate is one of Christopher’s major interests including a recent collaboration with the Belfast Poets and Belfast Legion of Improvised Sights and Sounds (BLISS) at the famed 'Open-Jack' sessions in the Catalyst Arts Gallery of Northern Ireland.
Recent research has seen Christopher focused on aspects of Networked Music Performance including a special project utilising the Virtual World 'Second Life' as a platform for concert music performance and three-dimensional sound diffusion in real-time. The virtual environment was also a central part of the 'Sonic Window' touch-screen sound installation he built for the SU Enterprise Centre on May 21st 2008. September 2008 saw the first performance of 'Puppet Whispers', a suite of pieces written for (dis)connected quartet utilising strings, saxophones, synthesizers, sensors and shadow puppetry.
Awards
Christopher’s studies at the Royal College of Music were funded by the esteemed Constant Kit and Lambert Scholarship from the Worshipful Company of Musicians in addition to a successful top-up funding bursary. He also held the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Full award for master’s level research at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) opened in 2004 by Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Having studied at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at the Queen's University Belfast, Christopher completed his MA degree in Sonic Arts in September 2008 after which he returned to the Royal College of Music to work towards an MMus in Composition for Screen based Media.