Peyman Heydarian
Peyman Heydarian, Born in Shiraz, Iran, Dr. Peyman Heydarian is an award winning music scientist
and santurist. A computer scientist and a musicologist, he developed a unique
performance style and an innovative tuning system to play a multi-ethnic
repertoire on the Iranian santur (Hammered Dulcimer), and developed computer
algorithms for the analysis of Persian musical signals. He has also worked on an
academic project on a content-based personal music recommender system
Peyman studied with grand masters of Persian and Kurdish music including
Mojtaba Mirzadeh, and Pashang Kamkar. He currently teaches the santur, the daf
and music technology courses at London Universities. He has performed over
1000 concerts worldwide, including regular concerts at SOAS, University of
London, the birthplace of world music. Peyman has toured the world with his
multi-ethnic programme “The Voice of Santur”, performing Persian, Kurdish,
Greek, Armenian, Turkish, English, Scottish, and Irish music.
Peyman was highly commended at SSMS 2007 for Analysis and Classification of
Persian Musical Modes, and his performance with audience participation won the
first prize in the European Electronic music contest, AudioMostly 2017. In 2019 he
received The Most Successful Kurd in the UK art award in UK parliament. He was
featured for his multi-ethnic programme on BBC Radio 3 [2021]: https://
soundcloud.com/santurista/peyman-heydarian-shur-e-simin-in-bakhtiary-
tx-06-06-2020
Peyman has over 20 publications, and an album “Felt-hammer improvisations”, a
musical dialogue between Ian and the US. All available on his website. He also
makes music for films and Radio and TV channels. Peyman has been researching
the possibilities of pushing the boundaries of the Persian music and the Santur
performance.
