Trevor Wishart was born 1946 in Leeds, England. He grew up there and would spend most of his working life in Northern England. Little is known about his musical upbringing, but he started to work with recorded sounds in 1969, in reaction to the death of his father. Abandoning traditional composition, he began collecting sounds of machinery. Wishart begun his active career as a composer of orchestral and electro-acoustic music, but his interests soon diverge to the computer and the human voice.