Manuel Rocha Iturbide is a Mexican sound artist, composer, and professor currently living in Mexico City. He studied composition at the Escuela Nacional de Música in the University of Mexico, and received a MFA in electronic music and composition in Mills College. He also studied composition and computer music at IRCAM, later pursuing his doctoral thesis on granular synthesis techniques at the University of Paris VIII (1992). In France, he worked at studios UPIC, GRM and IRCAM to produce works. From 1994-95, he worked as a researcher at IRCAM developing the Granular Systems Toolkit (GiST) and later as a professor at the University of Paris VIII where he taught synthesis and computer programming (1995-96). In 1996 he returned to Mexico where he became an active interdisciplinary artist.

Iturbide has been internationally recognized for his electroacoustic music with computers, instruments, electronics, and tape. He explores different approaches to the sonic phenomena; from pure imagination, and programmatic ideas, to conceptual art, the soundscape, and experimentation with different sound objects. His work has been commissioned by the Festival Internacional Cervantino, Arditti String Quartet and other venues, and he has received artistic support from Japan Foundation, Jóvenes Creadores from FONCA, and the Banff Center for the arts.

Iturbide has been invited to different international conferences to present his work (The Tuning of the World, 1993; The Biennial of Art and Technology, Connecticut 1994; ICMC 1995, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2004, 2006) and to electronic music festivals such as ABSOLUTE MUSIK in Austria, Experimental Intermedia in USA, Puddles in Japan, VAE from Perú, etc.

In 1991, he founded the radio art workshop, Laboratory of Artistic Experimentation in Sound (LEAS), at Radio Educación in Mexico City, and is co-founder of the International Sound Art Festival in Mexico City (1999-2002). As a researcher, he has written articles about the history of electroacoustic music, sound art, and radio art in Mexico.