Four NSW musicians and sound artists are set to amplify their creative careers and experimental work thanks to the NSW Government’s SoundLab Residency Program, delivered in partnership with leading design and engineering firm Arup.
The 2022 SoundLab Residency Program recipients are musician, artist and composer Megan Clune; vocalist, composer, and instrument designer Donna Hewitt; media artist Alex Davies; and sound artist Tom Ellard.
Arup’s Arts and Culture Australasia Leader, Chris Mercer said Arup is thrilled to continue its partnership with Create NSW to deliver the SoundLab Residency.
“We believe in the power of the arts and culture sector to fuel creativity, collaboration, and shared experiences to connect and inspire our global community. We look forward to welcoming the four artists to Arup’s SoundLab and the creative interactions within our walls between the artists and our designers, consultants and engineers,” Mr Mercer said.
A/Prof Donna Hewitt
Donna is a vocalist, composer, instrument designer and academic who specialises in electronic composition, music production and performance. Her work, most notably with Lady Electronica has been featured in prominent festivals including VIVID Festival (2018), Bondi Feast Festival (2018), (MINT Festival) Nova Scotia (2018). In 2019, she performed my #MeToo inspired works in Tokyo and UK. The residency will enable her to extend her practice to enable the control of spatial audio from the gestural and wearable controllers she has designed.
Tom Ellard
Tom has made electronic music, video and computer games here and overseas across popular and experimental formats and practices since 1979. He started with cassettes, mastered Blu-Ray discs then started his own music download site in 1993 before Google and PayPal existed. He is well known for key role with ‘Severed Heads’. Ellard performed in many parts of Europe, North America and Australia using what was state of the art video and sound production. The residency will be an opportunity for him to explore new possibilities and expertise.
Megan Clune
Megan is a musician, artist and composer whose work explores the dynamic relationships between music, technology, the body and temporality through composition, performance and installation, as well as collaborations with the visual and performance art, dance, and other musicians. Starting with her training as a classical clarinettist, she also has an interest in conceptualism and the avant-garde in both visual art and music. In 2021 her album If You Do was highly successful and garnered praise from multiple European, US and UK music publications. She will use the SoundLab residency to research ways of incorporating spatial audio into her composition practice, and creative development of a new recording project.
Dr Alex Davies
Alex is an award-winning media artist whose practice spans a diverse range of media and experiments with interaction, technology, perception, mixed reality and illusion. In 2013 he was awarded a PhD in Media Arts at the UNSW College of Fine Arts examining the relationship between the techniques of stage magic and the creation of illusion in media arts. He has awards for his work including the Creative Australia Fellowship and Scientia Research Fellowship. The residency will allow Alex to use ambisonic recordings as foundational acoustic material that will be transformed and augmented with synthesized elements also spatialised via ambisonic decoding.