Sylvia Pengilly

Sylvia Pengilly (March 23, 1935 – December 11, 2025) was a British-American musician and music professor. She was known for composing music by converting brain waves to electrical data that combines music with graphics. Pengilly continued lecturing and composing after semi-retiring in 1995.

Career

After completing her studies, she taught theory and composition at Western Illinois University for four years. She learned that Lissajous curves could be created with the use of a combined laser and mirror system built by physics professor Richard Peterson. She used the system to compose percussion and electronic music.

Personal life and death Sylvia Pengilly was born in London on March 23, 1935. Pengilly's childhood memories include gunfire, rockets, and bombings. Her family would travel to rural Sussex whenever the bombings would be at their worst, except for her father who was in the army. She attended music class each week while in Sussex. She learned about English folk music and her teacher would play the piano to accompany the music. Once the war ended, the entire family moved back to London, where her parents taught her how to play the piano. She enjoyed playing so much that she would often need to be forced away from it. At music class in high school, she was first exposed to a fugue by Bach. This led to her first composition, a fugue based on the C minor fugue from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier. She attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the 1950s and took a degree in music education.

Reception A 2005 review in Computer Music Journal states that Pengilly's work Patterns of Organic Energy "demonstrates a wide and inventive range of constantly evolving aqueous and kaleidoscopic forms". A review from the Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles states, "Sylvia Pengilly's Patterns of Organic Energy is a gorgeous work, containing some literal translations of image to music, made using Artmatic Pro and MetaSynth".

A review from the Miami Herald music critic James Roos says, "Sylvia Pengilly's Trio of 1979, though composed in four movements, ranging from Fugue and Lullaby to Scherzo and Epilogue, had a consistently acrid sound and a texture so fragmented it required a conductor to keep violin, viola and piano together, as they pulled in their own directions".