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Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969 , emigrated to Britain 1975 and has been living in the Netherlands since 1992. He studied musicology at York University, and later composition with Louis Andriessen. He currently lives is Amsterdam with his wife and two sons. As a composer he strives to create new forms and hybrids of media, synthesizing disparate sound sources and exploring spatial and temporal experience. He has focused in the majority of his work on ways of combining traditional performance practices with digital media. The sensory space where music happens is a particular preoccupation, and for this end a way of bypassing the conventional structures of how music is presented is sought. The question as to what music is actually communicating is also a recurring theme in his work and he is often drawn to the relation between emotion and language and how that defines our experience of music. His has written over eighty compositions, of which recent large scale works include the multimedia operas such as, ‘The Buffer Zone’, 'Spinoza (or The Thing Like Us)' , ‘Escamotage’ (FNM Staatsoper Stuttgart) ‘An Ocean of Rain’ (Cryptic) , multimedia concert works such as ‘The Queen is the Supreme Power in the Realm’ (MusikFabrik, ZKM, Koln Triennale) , ‘Mnemonist S’ (ASKO) and ‘Dreams of the Blind’ (Ensemble MAE). Prizes have included the Gaudeamus prize in 2000 for ‘a conSPIracy cantata’, and an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica 2006 for ‘Wordless’ (12 sound portraits). In 2007 he was composer in residence at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. He runs a label for experimental electronic music with Andy Moor, UNSOUNDS, is artistic director of Ensemble MAE, and teaches composition at the Netherlands Royal Conservatory in Den Haag. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.