Jonathan Pitkin (b.1978) is a composer, researcher and lecturer whose work increasingly involves the use of new technology, whether in the production of sound or in the reconfiguration and expansion of familiar instruments, made to behave in unexpected ways as if to suggest that they have minds of their own. He works around the edges of popular and classical, acoustic and electronic, and liveness and automation.

Jonathan was raised in Edinburgh, and now lives in the south-east of England. He studied at the University of Oxford, the Royal Academy of Music, and on exchange at the Paris Conservatoire. In 2009 he completed a doctorate at the Royal College of Music, where he now teaches various courses relating to composition and academic studies at Junior Department, Undergraduate and Postgraduate level. His principal composition teachers were Christopher Brown and Guy Reibel.

Jonathan’s music has been performed and commissioned internationally as well as at major venues across the UK, featuring at (for example) the Huddersfield, Spitalfields and New York City Electroacoustic Music Festivals, the IRCAM Forum Ateliers and the CIME General Assembly. Performers have included the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Singers, members of the Philharmonia Orchestra (as part of the Music of Today series), and conductors Stephen Layton, Nicholas Cleobury and Martyn Brabbins. A number of his works have been broadcast by BBC Radio 3, including the orchestral pieces Mesh and Borrowed Time; Con Spirito, for piano and Yamaha disklavier, which was shortlisted for a British Composer Award in 2008, and was part of the official British selection for the ISCM World Music Days in 2014 (Study no.2: Picket Fence and Chips received the same honour in 2025); and choral pieces which are published by Oxford University Press as part of the New Horizons series. As well as concert compositions, Jonathan's output includes installations, emulations, pedagogical software and composers' tools. His published writings include contributions to the proceedings of NIME and the ICMC, the SAGE Encyclopedia of Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2014) and the Routledge Companion to Aural Skills Pedagogy (2021).