Brad Garton (b. 1957) is currently on the Music Faculty of Columbia University, where he serves as Director of the Computer Music Center (formerly the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center). He originally studied engineering/biology at Purdue University, ultimately receiving a BS in Pharmacology. At the same time, he co-founded (with Richard K. Thomas) Zounds Productions, a multi-track recording facility specializing in sound design work for live theater. He entered the graduate program in Speech and Hearing Science at Purdue, doing psychoacoustic research under the supervision of Edward Burns and Larry Feth.

Soon his professional sound activities became time-consuming (and lucrative!) enough that he left graduate school, picking up a grant from the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns to work with local governments in developing noise control programs. After several years, Garton decided to "get serious" about his music again, and entered the graduate program in music composition at Princeton University. He received his PhD. from Princeton in 1989, studying primarily with Paul Lansky and Jim Randall. His dissertation was the development of a natural language/learning system for doing loosely-described signal processing tasks, along with a series of compositions realized using the system.

He has assisted in the establishment and development of a number of computer music studios throughout the world, and is an active contributor to the greater community of computer musicians/researchers, formerly serving on the Board of Directors of the International Computer Music Association as editor (with Robert Rowe) of the ICMA newsletter and artistic director/co-organizer of several high-profile festivals and conferences of new computer music.

His current work includes focused research on the modeling and enhancement of acoustic spaces as well as the modeling of human musical performance on various virtual "instruments". He is also the primary developer (with Dave Topper) of RTcmix, a real-time music synthesis/signal-processing language. His most recent work includes writing "Looching" apps: jlooch (JSyn) and mlooch (Max/MSP). The point of all this work is to continue to make fun new pieces of music, which he does every day.