Donald Eugene Swearingen's Obituary
Donald Eugene Swearingen, a San Francisco Bay Area electronic music composer, sound artist, photographer, and designer of interactive performance systems, died on Thursday, September 11, 2025, in Oakland, California. He passed away three years after a diagnosis of advanced kidney cancer. He was 75 years old. Born in 1950 in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Donald is survived by his partner, Pamela Z; his sister, Elizabeth Newman, and her husband, Martin; his brother, Larry Swearingen, and wife, Sherry Graham; his nephews, Chris Swearingen and Jasper Newman; and his niece, Haley Newman.
Donald grew up in Van Buren, Arkansas and, in his youth, studied classical piano, played woodwinds in high-school band and keyboards in rock bands, and spent many summers helping his father with agricultural work. As a young adult, he moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he worked for a decade in the music industry as a touring and recording rock musician and as a copyist for Stax and Hi Records. After earning a bachelor’s degree in music from Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis), he pursued interdisciplinary studies in computer music, electronics, and physics, and obtained advanced degrees in mathematics and computer science there.
In the mid-1980s, Donald moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he turned his focus to composing and performing contemporary electro-acoustic music and designing and building gesture-controlled musical instruments and performance software. During his 38 years in the Bay Area experimental electronic music community, he designed and built music performance and sound installation systems for area artists including Pamela Z, Dohee Lee, Miya Masaoka, Guillermo Galindo, and Amy X Neuburg. He was a founder and advisory board member of the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, served as a guest lecturer and instructor of sound and multimedia at San Francisco State University and CSU East Bay, and authored papers in electronic music journals including BYTE Magazine, Ylem Journal, and the ACM Journal. He was the software architect and developer of acoustic systems for LucasFilm Ltd and was a prized programmer and software developer at several innovative networking and telecommunications companies.
Donald composed and recorded a body of electronic music works that combined sampled voices and concrete sounds with digital synthesis and sequencing. Over the years, he recorded the voices of many friends, colleagues, and collaborators to create sample banks as source sounds for his composition process. His music was lush and emotive and was often laced with hints of a wry humor. In performance, he used a MIDI keyboard and gesture-controlled instruments of his own design to play sampled sounds with a subtle, pianistic technique.
Donald counted Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen as influences and spent considerable time studying their scores and recordings. He also drew inspiration from jazz pianists like Oscar Peterson and had great affection for classic blues and R&B artists such as Alberta Hunter and Al Green, whose portraits he displayed on his studio wall. Although music was his most passionate interest, he also developed a visual art practice in the medium of photography, creating a considerable portfolio of portraits and street photography, which he took great pains to meticulously edit, color-correct, and print.
He had great passion for mathematics and science, and devoted countless hours to the study of physics and reading journals and textbooks by the likes of Richard Feynman and Paul Erdös, who he considered heroes. An avid reader, he devoured the detective novels of Raymond Chandler and regularly scoured the pages of both the London and the New York Review of Books. He was a lover of film and deeply inspired by works of Satyajit Ray, Wong Kar-wai, and Akira Kurosawa. Donald loved fine food and wine and was a formidable cook with a penchant for using a variety of hot peppers.
He is remembered by the Bay Area new music community as well has his Van Buren community for his admirable modesty, his keen intellect, and for his kindness and generosity of spirit. He was adamant about helping fellow artists with upgrades and maintenance of their electronic music performance set-ups. During his final months, he tirelessly endeavored to complete his latest projects including a series of fixed-media sound works and a new standalone audio performance instrument. When asked about a bucket list a few days before his passing, he answered, without hesitation, that he’d been living his bucket list all his life.
What’s your fondest memory of Donald?
What’s a lesson you learned from Donald?
Share a story where Donald's kindness touched your heart.
Describe a day with Donald you’ll never forget.
How did Donald make you smile?