ROBERT JARVIS' work lies somewhere between that of a composer and a creative researcher. As a keen collaborator he has worked with 'experts' from many other disciplines, including outside of the arts. He is involved in the creation of temporary and permanent sound pieces.

He began his professional music career in 1985 as a trombonist playing in wide range of spaces - from busking outside to performances in schools, residential home and hospitals. This soon grew into project work where the focus would be on the creation of a music composition and often involving collaboration with other art forms.

At the same time his interest in composition grew as he not only wrote pieces for the various ensembles he played with, but also continued his teenage experiments with manipulating raw sound using tape and whatever else was to hand. Over the years, as Robert refined his ways of working, he eventually found ways to bring together his project work with his composing, and this, in turn, lead him to developing his own brand of socially-interactive composition projects and the creation of works such as Sparks & Waves (1998), Mossley Mill (1999) and Lambourn Voices (2011).

Eventually Robert began to concentrate on compositions for gallery spaces, with musical pieces that utilised sounds relating to specific areas. This soundscape work involved the processes of listening, engaging, collecting, composing and sharing, in order to bring out new understandings in harmony with the sounds of the area and the lives of the people that live there, and to encourage his listeners to reconsider their environments and question how they related to their surroundings. Compositions during this period include Disappear (2005) and Magic Stones (2006) both of which received the accolade of winning works in the New Media Category of the British Composer Awards in their respective years.

These days Robert's work is almost all installation based, and often inspired by scientific data collected from natural processes. His work has moved outside too, bringing his listeners directly in contact with nature, such as his genetically-inspired Grow (2007) for the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden in Surrey, his touring bat-inspired Echolocation (2008), or the astronomical aroundNorth (2014) - these last two works both being shortlisted for the PRSF New Music Award. aroundNorth is now permanently installed in the grounds of Armagh Observatory where it plays daily.

In addition to his compositional output, Robert still plays trombone, working internationally as an improviser, performing with a wide range of musicians and ensembles.

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