Roy David Magnuson is a Professor of Music at Illinois State University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in music theory and composition and serves as Director of the Adaptive Edge Institute. In that role, and during his year as a Provost Fellow for the Division of Academic Affairs (2023–2024), he has worked on the technologies that keep arriving faster than institutions can absorb them: artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, and spatial computing. 

He is the creator of solsticeVR, a virtual reality composition environment, and co-creator of RibbonsVR: Virtual Reality Assisted Conducting, which makes a student's gesture visible as it is drawn in the air. His music has been performed throughout the United States and Europe at the World Saxophone Congress, WASBE, CBDNA, the RED NOTE New Music Festival, the Robb Composers' Symposium, and NASA (still the oddest line in this bio). He is a member of ASCAP, and his music is recorded on Albany Records, NAXOS, and Tonsehen Records.