A composer and a pianist, Sever Tipei was born in Bucharest, Romania, and immigrated in the United States in 1972. He holds degrees in composition from the University of Michigan (DMA) and piano performance from Bucharest Conservatory (Diploma). Tipei taught at Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University and, between 1978 and 2021, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Music. After retirement Tipei continues to teach in the School of Information Sciences where he also directs the “James W. Beauchamp Computer Music Project”. He is also a National Center for Supercomputing Applications Faculty Affiliate. Between 1993 and 2003 Tipei was a Visiting Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory where he worked on the sonification of complex scientific data.

Most of his compositions were produced with software he designed: MP1 - a computer-assisted composition program first used in 1973, DIASS - for sound synthesis and M4CAVE - software for the visualization of music in an immersive virtual environment. More recently, Tipei and his collaborators have developed DISSCO, software that unifies computer-assisted (algorithmic) composition and (additive) sound synthesis into a seamless process. His compositions have been performed in the US, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain, United Kingdom and Taiwan.

Sever Tipei has published articles in the Computer Music Journal and Leonardo and presented numerous papers at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), Society for Electro-acoustic Music in the US (SEAMUS), Sound and Music Computing (SMC), International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) and Acoustical Society of America (ASA) among others.

Tipei regards the computer as a collaborator whose skills and abilities complement those of the human artist. He sees the composition of music both as an experimental and a speculative endeavor that delivers a particular world view.