UTS Music.Sound.Design Symposium 2008 speakers

Yasunao Tone (Japan)

Yasunao Tone was one of the first Japanese artists active in composing "events" and improvisational music. He has been active in the Fluxus movement since 1962 and has also been an organizer and participant in many important music and performance groups such as Group Ongaku, Hi-Red Center, Team Random (the first computer art group organized in Japan). Primarily a composer, Tone has worked in many media, creating pieces for electronics, computer systems, film, radio and television, as well as environmental art.

Tone was born in Tokyo in 1935 and graduated from Chiba Japanese National University in 1957 with a major in Japanese literature. Subsequently, he audited a program in musicology at Tokyo University of Arts. Here he founded the Group Ongaku in 1960, a group devoted to creating "event music" and improvisational music. He began participating in the Fluxus movement in 1962, and has been in events and shows in numerous places.

His first concert, "One Man Show by a Composer", was held at the Miami Gallery in Tokyo in 1962. He then became an organizer as well as contributor to various avant-garde groups. These activities encompassed happenings, experimental music, performance and "art and technology". Some of the Tokyo groups involved were the Hi-Red Center, a happening group founded in 1963; Sweet Sixteen, an event festival in 1963, the Team Random's "Biogode Process Music Festival" in 1966 (the first computer art festival in Japan, including Tone's "Theater Piece for Computer"), Intermedia Festival in 1969 and the late Tatsumi Hijikata and his Ankoku Butoh troupe. Tone also composed a great deal of experimental music for use in films, theater and dance pieces.

Since coming to the United States in 1972, he has composed four scores for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and has given solo concerts at the Kitchen, the Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Roulette, P.S.1, and other places, and participated in numerous Fluxus concerts. Since 1976, Tone has been designing musical compositions as a compound of cultural studies which have been ideas based on post-structuralist theories and audio visual materials compiled with ancient Oriental texts and musical sounds generated by electronic means. One of these works, Geography and Music, was commissioned by the American Dance Festival for Merce Cunningham's dance Roadrunners. It was part of the Cunningham Dance Company repertory between 1979 and 1986 and was heard in many festivals, including the Festival d'Automne á Paris, the John Cage Festival in San Juan and the Berlin Festival.

In 1990, Tone was commissioned to create a collaborative piece for the Westdeutscher Rundfunk's Hörspiel Festival in Cologne, and to participate in the Audio Art Festival at the Whitney Museum of American Art with Alison Knowles. He was included in the Fluxus Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1990, where his visual works were exhibited and he gave performances.

Tone has been awarded a CAPS Grant in multi-media, a New York State Council on the Arts commission grant for flutist Barbara Held, a National Endowment for the Arts grant through the Just Above Midtown Gallery for a collaborative work with Blondell Cummings and Senga Nengdi, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in performance/emerging forms.

Ernest Edmonds (UK)

Ernest Edmonds is an international expert on human-computer interaction and creativity. He is Professor of Computation and Creative Media in the faculty of Information Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney where he runs a multi-disciplinary practice-based art and technology research group, the Creativity and Cognition Studios. Ernest Edmonds also works as an artist in the constructivist tradition and first used computers in his practice in 1968. He first showed an interactive work with Stroud Cornock in 1970. He first showed a timebased generative work at Exhibiting Space in London in 1985. He has exhibited throughout the world, from Moscow to LA. He has about 200 refereed publications in the fields of human-computer interaction, creativity and art. Artists Bookworks has recently published his book On New Constructs in Art.

Kees Tazelaar (Netherlands)

Kees Tazelaar (July 27, 1962) was taught at the Institute of Sonology from 1981 to 1983 (Utrecht) and from 1987 to 1989 (The Hague). He subsequently studied composition with Jan Boerman at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, graduating in 1993. Since then Tazelaar has been teaching at the Institute of Sonology. He is head of Sonology since June 2006. In addition to his own autonomous works, he has contributed to music theatre projects by Dick Raaijmakers (Die glückliche Hand geöffnet, Scheuer im Haag) and Theatergroep Hollandia (Perzen, Varkensstal).

In recent years he has also been occupied intensively in the restoration and reconstruction of major electronic works from the past. In his specially equipped studio new versions have been made of compositions by Gottfried Michael Koenig (Klangfiguren II, Essay, Terminus), Jan Boerman (Kompositie 1972, Ruï ne), Edgard Varè se (Poè me Électronique), Iannis Xenakis (Concret P-H), György Ligeti (Pièce Électronique no.3, Artikulation), Luctor Ponse (Concerto voor Piano en Band). Since June 2005, Tazelaar is a visiting research fellow of the University of Bath, UK, and as such a participant in the VEP (Virtual Electronic Poem) project. During the winter semester of 2005-2006, Kees Tazelaar filled the Edgard Varèse guest professorship at the Technical University of Berlin.

Philip Samartzis

Philip Samartzis (Melbourne, Australia) is coordinator and lecturer in Sound within the School of Art, RMIT where in 2004 he completed a doctorate into surround sound in installation art. Outcomes from his research have informed numerous exhibitions including; Zoso (2007), Project Space, Melbourne; Dodgíem (2006), Grosser Wasserspeicher, Berlin; Unheard Spaces (2004), Candiani Cultural Centre, Mestre; Presence & Absence (2002), Statenlogement, Hoorn; and Transparency (2001), Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris. As an independent curator he has organized four Immersion festivals focusing on the theory and practice of sound spatialisation, as well as Variable Resistance - a series of international sound art presentations for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2001/2). Samartzis has also curated an overview of Australian sound culture titled Variable Resistance: Ten hours of sound from Australia for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002) and the Podewil Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2003).

As a solo artist he has performed widely in Australia, Japan, Russia, Europe and the United States including presentations at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, The DOM, Moscow, Museum of Modern Art, Strasbourg, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, and the Mori Arts Centre, Tokyo.

Samartzis has published five solo compact discs, Residue (1998), Windmills Bordered By Nothingness (1999), Mort aux Vaches (2003), Soft and Loud (2004) and Unheard Spaces (2006), and has also performed and recorded with leading international improvisers and musicians including Sachiko M, Seiichi Yamamoto, Gunter Muller, Voice Crack, Keiji Haino, Oren Ambarchi, Reinhold Friedl, Michael Vorfeld, Eric La Casa and Jean-Luc Guionnet. Samartzis was a recent recipient of an Asialink Arts Management Scholarship for the development of curatorial programs that promote Australian and Japanese sound culture.

John Bassett

John Bassett is a producer, engineer and acoustician based in Sydney. He currently teaches the Masters of Music Studies (Creative Sound Production) at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music as well as part of the production team at the Sydney Opera House and studying towards his phd at the University of Sydney as part of the Architecture and Audio Acoustics department.

Damian Castaldi

Damian Castaldi is a freelance sound designer and composer. He works independently and in co-partnership with Solange Kershaw for 'sodacake'. He currently teaches Audio Production, at UTS.

Densil Cabrera

Dr Densil Cabrera is a senior lecturer in audio and acoustics in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning , University of Sydney. He is the head of the Acoustics Research Laboratory, and the coordinator of the Graduate Audio and Acoustics program.

He did his PhD in psychoacoustics at the University of Sydney. Earlier degrees include a Master of Arts (University of Technology, Sydney), Graduate Diploma in Communication (University of Technology, Sydney) and Bachelor of Music (University of Sydney). He is the original author of the computer program PsySound, which is for the analysis of sound recordings using acoustical and psychoacoustical methods. He has done work in sound art, especially in art gallery-based sound installations.

Current and recent research projects have been in applications of psychoacoustical models, opera singer vocal quality, auditory spatial perception, room acoustical quality, and auditory display. Research collaborations have been with other faculties, other universities in Sydney, and universities in Japan, Korea and Italy.

He has been involved in consulting projects in areas such as acoustics education, auditory display design, building acoustics and auditorium acoustics. He is a member of the Audio Engineering Society, and is involved in the Sydney section organising committee and the Technical Committee on Human Factors in Audio Systems. He is a member of the Australian Acoustical Society. He represents the University of Sydney in standards development in the area of architectural acoustics.

Theo van Leeuwen

Before becoming an academic, Theo van Leeuwen worked as a film and television producer, scriptwriter and director in his native Holland and in Australia. He studied linguistics and semiotics at Macquarie and Sydney University and at the CETSAS in Paris.

He has worked at Macquarie University, the University of the Arts (London), and Cardiff University, and lectured at many other Universities throughout the world. He is now Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, UTS. He has written many books and articles on discourse analysis, visual communication and multimodality. His most recent book is Introducing Social Semiotics (Routledge, 2005) and he is currently working on Global Media Discourse, to be published with Routledge in 2007. He is also editor of the journal Visual Communication.

Shannon O'Neill

Shannon O'Neill is an artist, academic and curator, based in Sydney, Australia. Founder of Alias Frequencies he has been a director of Electrofringe and Liquid Architecture and is currently the program manager of ANAT's Embracing Sound Project. www.aliasfrequencies.org (opens an external site)

Nigel Helyer

Nigel Helyer (a.k.a. Dr Sonique) is a Sydney based Sculptor and Sound Artist with an international reputation for his large scale sonic installations, environmental works and new media projects.

Sherre Delys

Sherre DeLys' acoustic art for radio has been commissioned by national broadcasters across Europe, America, and Australasia, by artist-run internet stations like London's Resonance FM, and podcast by The Guardian. Her radiophonic pieces have been exhibited at The Pompidou Centre, Sydney Opera House, Chicago Cultural Center and Modern Art Museum, Kiasma. Her sound art and documentary works have been awarded international jury prizes including the French 'Phonurgia Nova-Grand Prix for Sound Design', and at home she was selected as Australia Council New Media Fellow in 2000.

In the area of radiophonic art DeLys has developed ongoing collaborations with U.S. novelist Rick Moody, musician Chris Abrahams (The Necks) and others. She's been a team-member for ABC's The Listening Room, and The Next Big Thing, WNYC.

Kirsten Reese

Kirsten Reese is a composer and sound artist based in Berlin. She creates experimental music for electronics and instruments, audiovisual installations, and performative works with electronic media. She studied flute and electroacoustic music in Berlin (Hochschule der Künste, 1988-1996) and New York (1992/93). Her works were presented at concerts and in galleries and at national and international festivals, i.e. Donaueschinger Musiktage 2006 and Festival Rümlingen 2007. She received numerous grants and residencies (i.e. Berlin Senate; Stiftung Kulturfonds; Cité des Arts, Paris). As a flutist she has performed mostly experimental music and has worked with many contemporary composers and sound artists. She was co-curator of the festival Klangwerkstatt in Berlin. Kirsten Reese held a research position at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg and teaches sound art and intermedia composition at the Universität der Künste Berlin.

Bert Bongers

Bert Bongers is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney, where he is setting up a new Lab for research and design of interactivated environments, interfaces and instruments. The aim of his work is to create solutions for what he calls the "Human-Computer Mismatch", to enable a better communication between the two virtual worlds or domains - the human mind and the computer programs. These worlds meet, and interact, in physical space and therefore an interface artefact should enable a rich, physical, mutliple degree-of-freedom computer input (control) and multimodal output (feedback) to intensely address the human senses. Haptic interaction has been a central notion in his work. For nearly twenty years he has researched the interaction of artists and others who want to convey their ideas through using computers. By actually building interfaces, from electronic musical instruments to interactive architectural spaces, he has proven that it is possible to create very sensitive devices with relatively low cost sensors, actuators and other hardware. It enables users to reach inside of the machine to take back the control, to make the processes in virtual space malleable through physical interaction.

He has a background in Electrical and Computer Engineering, an MSc. degree in Ergonomics / Human - Computer Interaction from UCL London, and a PhD in HCI from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He worked as an instrument builder with STEIM (the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam and at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, as a technical manager and professor at the Rijksakademie (the post graduate artist in residence academy) in Amsterdam, as a researcher on haptic interfaces and multimodal representation for multimedia home systems and networks at Philips Corporation, NL, as a researcher on novel interfaces for motion-impaired computer users at the University of Cambridge, England, and worked with the architectural offices of NOX and ONL on the interactivation of spaces. Bert has lectured and published about his work, including books and book chapters. As a consultant he worked on interactive technology for projects such as an opera at ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Media- House project of the Metapolis group of architects in Barcelona.

Together with Jonathan Impett he founded the Meta-Orchestra in 2000 as a large scale European project. With composer and visual artist Yolande Harris he has been working on real-tme performance of audio/video material addressing the architectural space with the Video-Organ. In 2001 he founded a new lab / studio for the electronic arts at Metronom gallery in Barcelona, where he also curated and organised a festival with concerts and presentations on the theme of new interfaces in January 2002. Since June 2002 he has been involved as part-time lecturer and curriculum developer at several universities in the Netherlands, on topics related to interface design or more general, as he calls it, the interaction between people and their electronic environment. Since 2003 he is part-time Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, regularly involved as a lecturer and consulant at the Hyperbody Research Group at the Architecture Department of the Delft University of Technology, and is involved in the Industrial Design department as well as the Professional Doctorate programme of User- System Interaction at the Eindhoven University of Technology. In 2004 he has set up a new lab for the electronic arts in Maastricht, the MaasLab.

Andrew Johnston

Andrew's background is in the performing arts. He completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) -Music Performance (trombone) at the University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts in 1995 and has since performed with several Australian Symphony and Opera Orchestras and many other ensembles. He has also worked in music theatre, playing principal trombone for the musicals 'Sunset Boulevard' and 'Les Miserables' in their Melbourne seasons.

Seeking to combine his long-term interest in computing with his background in music, he completed a Masters degree in Information Technology and in 2004 commenced work on a PhD investigating the design and use of software to support an experimental, exploratory approach to live music-making.

Andrew currently holds the position of Lecturer in the Faculty of IT at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Stephen Barrass

Stephen Barrass is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Communication and Co-Director of the Sonic Communications Research Group at the University of Canberra . He obtained a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the University of NSW in 1986, and a Ph.D. on Auditory Information Design from the Australian National University in 1997. He took up a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Kommunication in Germany through 1998-1999. Upon return to Australia he lead research on Advanced Audio Interfaces at the CSIRO ICT Centre in Canberra from 2000-2004. Stephen has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles, and regularly contributes to international conference committees and invited expert workshops. He served on the Board for the International Community on Auditory Display from 1998-2004, and was Organizing Chair for the International Conference on Auditory Display in Sydney 2004.

His research interests include mixed reality, interaction design, interactive museum exhibits, multimodal information displays, sonification, generative art, and new interfaces for musical expression.

Danielle Wilde

Danielle Wilde is an artist researcher affiliated with Monash University and the CSIRO division of Textile and Fibre Technology investigating how technology might be paired with the body to poeticise experience. To this end she creates wearable interfaces and body extensions that inspire people to move. The aim is to prod people to consider their relationships to their bodies and to broaden their thinking about the relevance of technology to the dreams, hopes and aspirations we each hold. Projects include highly visible, extended and extending interfaces through to "invisible", embedded and distributed systems. Current research is focused on hip- and core-body- controlled interfaces that support the actuation and control of sound.

Wilde was born in Wollongong Australia, and lived from 1994 to 2006 in Europe, the USA and the UK. She has an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art in London and a large body of work encompassing wearable interactive interfaces, performance, installation, still and moving image, design for theatre and architecture, documentary film research, production and project management and interaction design. She has consulted and designed for the Equator IRC, for Sussex and Bristol Universities, and for MediaLab Europe, amongst others. Her work, informed by her experience across languages, cultures and disciplines, has been presented in galleries, museums, festivals, conferences and performance venues around the world.

Donna Hewitt

Donna Hewitt is a composer/performer working with voice, environmental and computer processed sound. Much of her compositional work involves reprocessing microphone captured audio via various digital processes to produce complex musical textures. As a PhD commonwealth scholarship student and part-time lecturer in the Music Area at the University of Western Sydney, she is working with multi-channel audio and has completed a number of studio pieces in the Dolby 5.1 surround format. Recently she has been exploring real time digital performance systems and custom interfaces in object/patcher environments. Her work has been frequently broadcast and appears on a number of compilation CDs of electronic music.

Norie Neumark

Norie Neumark is a sound/radio and new media artist. Her radiophonic works have been commissioned and broadcast by the Listening Room, ABC Classic FM, and internationally. Her artists residencies include The MacDowell Colony (2006) and La Cite Internationale des Arts (2004, 2006). Norie coedited and wrote the introduction to, At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (The MIT Press, 2005). She is co-editor of The Grain of the Voice in Digital Media and Media Art (forthcoming, The MIT Press, 2008/09) Her work as part of the collaboration with Maria Miranda, as Out-of-Sync, can be accessed via http://www.out-of-sync.com (opens an external site). Their recent work has been exhibited in Australia and overseas, including Searching for Rue Simon Crubellier and Talking about the Weather.

Ian Andrews

Ian Andrews, born 1961 (Australia) is a Sydney based independent film, video and sound artist who has been practicing since 1981. Much of Andrews' work consists of video/sound collage, "cut-up", and agit-prop culture jamming utilising a diverse range of visual styles - from animation to "found" footage. The work is often characterised by themes such as technology and subjectivity. Ian Andrews currently teaches cultural theories of sound at the University of Technology Sydney, and works as technical coordinator at Metro Screen

Darrin Verhagen

Darrin Verhagen is a freelance music writer for dance, theatre and computer games. He has released a variety of albums under his own name, as well as a range of pseudonyms and teaches at RMIT.

Tom Ellard

Tom Ellard is an Australian electronic musician most well known as a member of the electronic and industrial music group Severed Heads. In 2005 Ellard received the Australian Record Industry Association's ARIA Music Award for the best original soundtrack/cast/show for the soundtrack to the Australian film The Illustrated Family Doctor. He continues to record music and soundtracks and also lectures at a variety of educational facilities on music production in Australia. He is the creator and director of sevcom.com, a website for alternative methods of music distribution and creation.

Andrew Plain

Andrew is a Sound Designer (Huzzah Sound, Fox Studios, Sydney) who has gained an international reputation through his award-winning sound work on films as diverse as The Truman Show, Lantana, In the Cut, Look Both Ways and Travellers and Magicians (see http://www.huzzahsound.com (opens an external site) for further details, including work-in-progress). He holds a BA (Pysch) from Macquarie University and a BA Com from the New South Wales Institute of Technology (now UTS).

Ben Byrne

Ben Byrne is a Sydney based laptop musician, curator, radio producer and writer whose work traverses musical performance and improvisation, composition, radiophonics and sound theory. He is project coordinator of the UTS Music.Sound.Design project and is undertaking a phd at UTS.

Peter Blamey

Peter is a Sydney-based musician and sound artist working with whatever comes to hand, with the aim of emphasising the material aspects of sound. Lately this has led to a backhanded combination of systematic and improvised methods for working with mixer feedback and saturation, the sounds from which then shuffle, spike, catch, fray and perforate each other before or during their trip to the speakers. He is currently completing his phd at the University of Western Sydney, exploring the sine tone and contemporary music.

Mitchell Whitelaw

Mitchell Whitelaw is an academic, writer and artist with interests in new media art and culture, especially complex generative systems and digital sound and music. Mitchell's background is in music and the visual arts (by way of an interdisciplinary first degree in the Faculty of Creative Arts at Wollongong University). After teaching at Wollongong with Frances Dyson, he became more interested in art and cultural theory and continued to develop creative work in digital sound and image. He began postgraduate study at the University of Technology, Sydney, in 1996, working with Douglas Kahn on a research project exploring art, emergence and artificial life. He completed a PhD in 2001, moving the same year to Canberra to take up a position at the University of Canberra. Mitchell's writing has appeared in journals including Leonardo, Digital Creativity and Contemporary Music Review. In 2004 his work on a-life art was published in the book Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (MIT Press, 2004). Other recent highlights include a catalog essay on creative data sonification for Sonic Acts X (2004). His current work in theory and practice spans generative art and sonic and visual data-aesthetics. Mitchell is currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra.

Caleb Kelly

Caleb Kelly produced his doctoral thesis at the University of Canberra in Australia. His thesis is about cracked and broken media in 20th century experimental music. The thesis focuses on the use of manipulated, broken and destroyed objects for the creation of new sound and compositional devices in experimental music particulary through the use of turntables and CDs. Caleb Kelly also produced a regular sound event in Sydney called impermanent.audio, evenings of electronic experimentation in new audio practices and has featured both local and international musicians. He has also involved in the local experimental music festival 'What is Music?'

Robin Fox

Robin Fox makes us listen to image and look at sound. His cathode ray oscilloscope, the device that translates a digital sound file into an analogue visual display, permits this. The two dimensions - sound and image - communicate via the common denominator of electrical current. Left and right signals of the audio input are mapped onto vertical and horizontal axes of a visual display within a square field defined by four electromagnets. When there is no sound, the point of light is at rest in the centre of the screen (like a dead heartbeat). When the hisses, beeps and static scratchings of the sound composition are fed into the oscilloscope, excited geometric patterns of light scribble and weave simultaneously around the x and y coordinates of the screen producing an apparition of sound life. Heightened states of tension are built by Fox between hyperactivity and a kind of fractured stillness with things never tending to rest. Many of the images that evolve in the work could only be generated by overloading the digital sampling system employed by the artist and by using frequencies above and below the audible limit for human beings. Fox's materials are sound, numbers, frequency, amplitude and phase relationships.

James Hurley

James Hurley was the first Australian, and one of only a handful of audio professionals in the world, to attain Digidesign Certified Pro Tools Expert status. He is also one of the world's leading Digidesign certified instructors and maintains knowledge of Digidesign technologies via annual re-certification at Digidesign headquarters in San Francisco. James has worked extensively in the Australian film, radio and music industries as a composer, sound designer, producer, sound mixer and DigidesignTM technician. Recent credits include his role as music editor for Lucky Miles (SAFC, FFC 2006). In 2003, James helped establish Australia's first Digidesign authorized Pro School at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), giving Australian audio professionals, or those wanting to break into the audio industry, the chance to gain certification in Pro Tools - the most widely supported audio production system in the world. When not training, he manages UTS' Media Production Centre.

Julian Knowles

Julian Knowles is a composer and performer, specialising in new and emerging technologies. His creative work spans the fields of composition for theatre, dance, film and television, electronic music, sound and new media arts, popular music and record production. Since the mid 1980s, he has established himself as a leading artist in the area of electronic and new music, achieving significant critical praise and international recognition for his performances and recordings. In recent years, Julian's music and audio/visual work has been presented at events and venues such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Experimental Intermedia in New York City, the Seoul International Performance Art Festival, What is Music?, the Sydney Biennale, Melbourne International Film Festival and the Sydney Opera House.

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