David M Howard is a professor of Electronic Engineering. He was head hunted to move from being a professor of Music Technology in the Department of Electronics at the University of York, UK in 2017 to become the Founding Professor of a brand new Department of Electronic Engineering at Royal Holloway, University of London in the UK. His first task was to design a new building, later named the Shilling Building after Beatrice Shilling, an engineer who provided a simple-to-fit ingenious solution to fuel starvation in the Rolls Royce Merlin engine in diving Spitfires and Hurricanes during the Second World War.

His vision for the new Department of Electronic Engineering was to place creativity at the heart of electronic engineering - if the product is going to sell, people must be fascinated by it. The Department runs under the motto: Creativity first science follows.

David's academic career started with a BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at University College London in 1977, followed by a PhD in single channel cochlear implant hearing aids in UCL's Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at UCL in. Post PhD, he gained a lectureship there to teach on a new BSc in Speech Sciences to teach a voice sciences laboratory based course. He moved to the University of York to teach on a new BSc in Music Technology in 1990, becoming Head of Department in 1996. He remained at York until he joined Royal Holloway.

David's research brings together electronic engineering with applications in speech, music and singing analysis and synthesis. Of particular interest has been the changes that occur in a voice when it is trained, how computers might be used to provide real-time visual feedback to aid that training process, perception of pitch, voice synthesis, and latterly, the implementation of his Vocal Tract Organ (a keyboard or pitch slider instrument that uses 3-D prints of vocal tract shapes for vowels as its 'pipes'. He has worked for a number of years with Professor Graham welch (Institute of Education, London) on the WinSingad system which provides real-time displays of voice features and is used in voice training.

David was bought out of teaching by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in the UK to promote science, technology and engineering - see YouTube [1]. David was an on-screen acoustics of singing consultant for the BBC TV programme 'Castrato' which was first broadcast on 26th June 2007. David was the presenter for the BBC TV programme 'The Voice' which was first broadcast on 20th January 2008.

David lead the work to synthesise a vowel from the 3000-year-old Mummy, Nesyamun in 2020 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56316-y) which resulted in an invitation to give a TEDx talk in Vienna based around that work. This talk was later uprated to an international Ted talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/david_m_howard_can_we_recreate_the_voice_of_a_3_000_year_old_mummy).

David plays the organ and is currently organist at St. Mary's Thorpe (near Thorpe Park) and Musical Director of Feltham Choral Society which gives three concerts per annum. When in York, he sang as a Deputy Tenor Songman in York Minster and he conducted the Beningbrough Singers, a 12-strong a capella singing group that sang concerts in the York area and he conducted the Vale of York Voices, a York Minster auxiliary choir that sang monthly evensongs in the Minster. David is married with two children.