FESTIVAL PROGRAMME

DETAILED PROGRAMME INFORMATION

WELCOME & LIGHTNING TALKS 2pm - 2:30pm

We will kickstart our festival programme with a series of short five-minute lightning talks to spark your imagination, pique your curiosity and help us tune in to all the creative possibilities of immersive spatial audio. Our line up of speakers include:

TIM LAND

Tim’s DJing with Spatial Audio talk will explore the evolution of this emerging practice and will offer practical and accessible strategies for creative and technical development.

Tim Land is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire and a musician and producer working under the name Landslide. He has released albums, EPs, and remixes on both independent and major labels, is a BAFTA award recipient for interactive sound work, and has toured internationally as a DJ and with award-winning bands. 

He has been working with spatial audio for over ten years, with a particular focus on production and composition strategies for popular music. During this time, he has also developed and explored approaches to DJ performance using spatial audio. Tim is the convenor of the Everyday is Spatial conference and concert series at the University of Gloucestershire.

NATALIA MAMCARCZYK

Natalia will be delivering a lightning talk about Audioscenic alongside Audioscenic demos throughout the festival. Natalia is an experienced sound artist, engineer and educator, working predominantly with spatial audio. Her research focuses on bringing immersive sound to diverse audiences, regardless of format. Having recently joined the team at Audioscenic, she supports the mission to make spatial audio available to everyone, through their accessible Cross Talk Cancellation technology. 

CAMERON J LAING

In Cameron’s Natural Forms and Transference talk, Cameron will reflect on the democratisation of music technology. While it increases access, it is often mediated by software and AI that privilege technical replication over distinct artistic enquiry. This can inadvertently steer creation toward homogenisation, resulting in a landscape saturated with convergent “content.” Faced with this convergence, the default search for a unique voice frequently becomes a cycle of technological consumerism; a pursuit of originality through new equipment that is ecologically unsustainable and artistically circular.

Natural Forms and Transference is the culmination and foundational point of a 7-year search for an alternative approach in how the natural local environment can be used as a new and captivating performative practice merging improvisational technique and philosophical enquiry that elevates the more than human, and the sociological importance of the environments in which we inhabit. Combining Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and the representation of the real, the process relates to our symbiosis of the natural world and the modern digital realm, and how we implement harmony between the two.  

Cameron J Laing is a British-Luxembourgish multi-disciplinary contemporary artist and musician whose transdisciplinary practice investigates the evolving relationship between nature, the environment and technology. With over 20 years of international experience, his career began in music after studying performance at the ACM, leading to major-label work as a Songwriter and Musician at renowned studios including Olympic, RAK, and EMI.

ASK THE EXPERT STATIONS 2:30pm - 3pm

An opportunity for you to gain creative and technical advice on your immersive audio projects and ideas from our friendly experts including Andrew Scheps, Jan Meinema and Tim Land. To make the best use of this session, it may prove beneficial to have a couple of questions in mind that you would like help with to hone your immersive audio practice. It is a very supportive learning environment so all questions from all abilities are welcome.

WORKSHOPS 3pm - 4:30pm

On the day, you can choose from one of two workshops running simultaneously:

Immersive Audio Recording Techniques Workshop led by Andrew Scheps.

Immersive mixing has been a hot topic for many audio professionals for the last several years, but what about immersive recording?  In this workshop Andrew will be talking about immersive microphone arrays and will be playing back examples that use many different mic techniques to give you a sense off the possibilities in capturing not only a performance, the space as well. In case you’re not sold yet, we’ll also be listening to recordings of whales!

Andrew Scheps is a three-time Grammy-winning mix engineer, recording engineer, and producer. His mixing credits include major artists like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adele, Metallica, Jay-Z, Green Day, Black Sabbath, Hozier, and U2. He's received Grammys for Best Rock Album (Red Hot Chili Peppers' Stadium Arcadium), Album of the Year (Adele's 21), and Best Reggae Album (Ziggy Marley's Fly Rasta), plus been named International Engineer of the Year by the UK's Music Producers Guild. He also received honorary doctorates from Buckinghamshire New University (2019) and the University of Huddersfield (2022).

Immersive modular synthesiser orchestra Workshop led by Joseph Hyde

Joseph Hyde will lead a practical workshop/sonic mayhem session which will introduce you to analogue modular synthesis through the wonderful Music Thing Modular Workshop System. This is a perfect little system to get started on, with a really open approach which means it can do anything - not just synthesis, but processing recordings, connecting with other performers and gear. We’ll have a set of these instruments available for you to play with, and the aim of the workshop will be to get together a short ensemble performance.

Joseph Hyde is an Emeritus Professor of Creative Music Technology at Bath Spa University, freelance artist and researcher working with sound, media, and technology. Emeritus Professor of Creative Music Technology at Bath Spa University for over 20 years, he left academia in 2022 to focus on independent practice. His work spans electroacoustic music, visual music, and immersive audiovisual performance, with notable projects including Signal to Noise for 360 video and 3rd-order Ambisonic sound. Hyde collaborates extensively in contemporary dance and interactive systems, and conducts research on early visual music pioneers. His work has been commissioned by the BBC, Sonic Arts Network, and Rambert Dance, receiving recognition from Prix Ars Electronica and Transmediale. He is also Director of Purple Noise, a Community Interest Company providing music technology education across Wiltshire and Somerset.

EMERGING TALENT COLLECTIVE LISTENING EVENT 4:50pm to 6pm

We’re excited to support and celebrate immersive audio emerging talent played back for your listening pleasure on our network’s mobile Immersive Audio Lab of 25 Genelec speakers and 3 subwoofers. This event showcases work from early-career creators, students, or first-time submitters working in immersive audio who wish to showcase their spatial sound pieces in a supportive and exploratory environment.

We are delighted to confirm our Emerging Talent Official Selection:

Journey Along a Water Edge – Lily Pead (Running time: 05:05)

Lily has devised a nature soundscape, following the journey of a stream and the life around it built in Reaper in 3rd order ambisonics. Lily is a 19-year old student studying Sound and Music Production at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham. This marks Lily’s first time working with spatial audio. Lily would like to compose and sound design for film and games.

Peace of Mind…? - Andrea Strata (Running time: 05:22)

Peace of Mind…? is a fixed-media ambisonics composition by Italian composer modulo21. The work revolves around the notion of stability and its inevitable disruption, exploring the human tendency to pursue a state of inner balance that remains, by nature, fragile and temporary. Rather than portraying peace of mind as a final destination, the piece frames it as a continuous and unresolved process, shaped by tension, expectation, and collapse.

Andrea Strata (modulo21) is an Italian multimedia artist, sound designer and creative coder based in Berlin. His artistic work is based on the creation of interactive installations and audio devices that invite anyone to engage in creative exploration through the use of movement analysis, sensors and deep learning techniques. He is currently a PhD researcher at the Conservatory of Vicenza, Italy.

The Kennington Loop – Alvin Roobi (Running time: 05:35)

This project marks an early step in Alivin’s exploration of immersive storytelling reflecting a growing interest in creating cinematic, spatial listening experiences that place the audience at the centre of the work.

Alvin Roobi is an emerging sound designer based in Cheltenham, United Kingdom. He recently graduated from the University of Gloucestershire with a BA (Hons) in Sound and Music Production. His practice is shaped by a strong interest in cinema and immersive storytelling, with a particular focus on eerie and unsettling atmospheres. Using spatial audio and environmental textures, Alvin explores how sound can alter perception and transform familiar environments into emotionally charged spaces.

Commiato - Cristiana Palandri (Running time: 08:31)

Commiato is an Ambisonics piece created through analogue instruments such as the electric guitar, modular synthesisers, recorded vocal samples and an extensive use of soundscape sounds combined through convolution with digital synthesis. Commiato addresses the issue of global warming not only by using recorded soundscape sounds that reveal intense climatic variations and melting ice, but above all as a farewell, a piece that becomes an elegy.

Composer and visual artist, Cristiana Palandri graduated in Electronic Music at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan and in Composition at the Conservatory of Italian Switzerland. She is currently a PhD researcher in Music Technology and Innovation at De Montfort in Leicester (UK). Since 2022 she is part of the Spheres ensemble (with Bruna di Virgilio: piano and Chiara Ludovisi: viola), with which, in 2023, she performed her A Letter to Johanna, dedicated to the composer Johanna Beyer, at the LAC in Lugano. In 2023 she performed her opera in four scenes, Il sogno di Kubik, at the DamsLab, University of Bologna.

Don’t Look Back – Alex Leeson (Running time: 09:18)

Don't Look Back is an Immersive installation piece, following the Ancient Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice and told entirely in either Latin or Ancient Greek. The happy couple, Orpheus and Eurydice, are celebrating their wedding, when Eurydice is bitten by a snake and dies. Orpheus, overcome with despair by the death of his wife, begs to the Fates and journeys into the Underworld to save Eurydice. Attempting the impossible, he begins to lead Eurydice back to Earth. But, without thinking, he accidentally banishes her back into the Underworld forever and must walk back to Earth alone. Using a library of personally recorded binaural soundscapes as a guide, Alex worked on both headphones and in a dedicated 7.1.4 Atmos studio room using ProTools Studio. The spatial approach was inspired by actors and performances in stage theatre and wanting to transcend it by creating a sense of characters and environments moving in a room despite them not being there.

Alex is inspired by the world of theatre and film, creating unique theatrical experiences using Dolby Atmos tools. After recently graduating from his BA(hons) in Creative music Technology at Bath Spa University, Alex started up his own small freelance Sound Design, Immersive audio and Post-Production Studio in London.

Clutterbrain – Kat Pegler (Running time: 04:45)

Clutterbrain is an immersive spatial audio work exploring Kat’s lived experience of ADHD within the context of the climate emergency. The piece responds to the contradiction of seeking calm in nature while feeling overwhelmed by it; where environments that promise restoration instead amplify cognitive noise, ecological grief, and sensory overload. There is business in the silence.

The work combines mouth harp, electronic textures, and field recordings captured across landscapes in the UK, weaving together human breath, rhythm, and environments at risk. Central to the piece are rain-filled firepits used as resonant gongs; improvised, elemental instruments that become sites for meditation and listening. These sounds create moments of stillness within disruption, offering a counterpoint to the mental chaos that emerges during walks in nature.

Kat is a composer and interdisciplinary artist exploring immersive sound as a way to reconnect with the more-than-human world. Working with her new passion of spatial audio, field recordings from environments at risk, and a musical language spanning electronic and folk traditions, she creates sound works rooted in place and imagination. Her emerging practice is shaped by an ADHD-informed interest in flow state and future folklore; using sound as a bridge between inner experience and ecological listening. Through immersive audio, Kat invites slow, attentive encounters with landscapes, stories, and unseen connections.

YMA NAWR BORTH - Rhian Christabel (Running time: 10:08)

Yma Nawr Borth is the second piece in a series of works exploring places in Wales that are under threat from climate change. In July 2025, Rhian visited Borth, a village on the Welsh coast that is strung along the coast line between Aberystwyth and Aberdyfi and has been identified by Natural Resources Wales as at threat of coastal erosion and storm damage from an increase in severe weather events.

Yma Nawr Borth began with an ambisonic recording on the beach in Borth in summer 2025. Alongside this, Rhian made a range of field recordings on the beach and in the village, focusing on the sea, birds, the sounds of the beach, and the human sounds of the village next to the beach. From these recordings, I have created a cyclical journey from the road to the beach and into the sea, and then back to the beach and the road.

Rhian an acousmatic, electro-acoustic, soundscaping composer from Wales. Her journey so far has been driven by a passion for music and participation. After a career in opera directing and making music with young people and communities, she has finally found space to make her own work. Her compositional practice focuses on climate and community.

Storm Break - Lloyd Cumming (Running time: 05:33)

This piece was developed over several weeks. Lloyd wanted to try and take advantage of every speaker Lloyd had available to try and create something that sounded as big as Lloyd could possibly get it in a small space.

Lloyd is a student artist, studying sound and music production at the University of Gloucestershire. Creating music has not something Lloyd has always done. However, music has been a long part of Lloyd's life. Living in rural Wales has given Lloyd some wonderful scenery, which is where Lloyd takes inspiration from when making music.

Murmur - Clare Unsworth (Running time: 05:01)

A sound installation project that began with murmurations of starlings, ‘Murmur’ gathers experiential field recordings and resonant warning sounds from across Romney Marsh and weaves them into an intimate and expansive textural experience that explores the subtle, seductive power of the patterns and signals around us and the ways that we are intuitively drawn to interpret them. The concept was originally devised as part of a film installation for Art in Romney Marsh festival but with support from Screen South's Immersive Sound Lab, the soundscape was developed into a dynamic stand-alone spatial audio work, aiming to capture the peacefully chaotic waves and contractions of swarms of starlings.

Clare Unsworth is an arts filmmaker based in Folkestone, Kent. Their practice is rooted in a lifelong fascination with audio-visual experimentation and its potential for fostering connection. Over the years, Clare has prolifically collaborated with artists, poets, and musicians while simultaneously developing a series of personal works exploring their mental health experiences, including 'She Said', 'It Speaks', and 'Murmur'. Their films have screened at festivals around the world, recognised for their poetic sensitivity, immersive atmosphere, and gentle yet incisive reflections on human experience. Clare’s work aims to cultivate empathy and a greater sense of belonging. Inspired by the beauty and mystery of the everyday world and of each other, their work invites us to navigate our lives with more curiosity, kindness and self-acceptance.

ESTABLISHED TALENT COLLECTIVE LISTENING EVENT 7pm to 8:10pm

Our Established Talent collective listening event showcases more advanced practitioners, professional sound/music artists, and spatial audio creators with a demonstrated body of work. This category celebrates refined, ambitious, and mature immersive audio compositions — works that push the boundaries of spatial sound.

We are pleased to announce our Established Talent Official Selection:

Windmills of Lapua - Nikki Sheth (Running time: 06:56)

“Direct impacts of wind farms can include collision and barotrauma (damage to tissues from air pressure changes around turbines); indirect impacts can include habitat loss (roosts, commuting routes and foraging areas) and fragmentation.” – bats.org.uk

This piece comments on the impact of wind farms on the bat population. It uses field recordings of windmills taken in Lapua, Finland using microphones that pick up normally inaudible frequencies (such as contact and electromagnetic mics), combined with field recordings of bats. The piece was originally composed for the 3D IKO loudspeaker. This work was made possible thanks to the Develop you Creative grant from Arts Council England.

Nikki Sheth is an internationally recognised sound artist and composer. She was also our Immersive Audio Network Sound Artist-in-Residence last year. Her work aims to give voice to the environment and foster a deeper connection with the natural world through field recordings, soundscape composition and spatial audio installations. Her interests in environmental sound include interspecies communication, nocturnal soundscapes and acoustic ecology - the relationship between sound and humans. She was nominated for Ivor Novello Composer Award (2021), winner of the Leah Reid Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music (2023) and winner of the Wildlife Sound Recording Society Creative Class Competition (2025). Described by The Wire Magazine as ‘dark, murky and mysterious, but also gorgeously trippy, enchanting and utterly alluring’, her work has been played at Quench Gallery (Margate), Kings Place (London) and Ars Electronica (Austria) as well as on BBC Radio 3. Nikki holds a PhD in Musical Composition from The University of Birmingham and is a Visiting Lecturer at Birmingham Conservatoire.

Living Matter - Mara Simpson (Running time: 10:00 excerpt)

Living Matter is a spatial sound installation by long-term collaborators, multi-instrumentalist and composer Mara Simpson and sound engineer, Tobin Jones. Taken from the album of the same name, Living Matter is a series of 10 compositions, responding to poems by the writer JLM Morton. This immersive audio piece now reimagines the album for an immersive installation setting, re-mixing and significantly re-arranging the instrumentation and structure of the album tracks to incorporate the way the room behaves as an instrument in immersive audio, and how the audience will connect with the piece. In this case it was all about stripping back elements to reveal a sense of specific positioning in the room and choosing the moments within the compositions narrative to envelop the audience with fuller sounds.

Mara is a multi-instrumentalist, performing artist, producer and composer. Her work seamlessly blends electronic and acoustic instruments, exploring tape machines, analogue synths and field recordings. Her fourth studio album Living Matter (2025), written and engineered in the studio she hand built with friend and collaborated Philippe Nash, was written in response to a set of poems by celebrated poet JLM Morton published in her book Red Handed. Centred around our connection to green and blue spaces, of ancient land and artefact, Living Matter has become a 6Music favourite, been performed live across stages, and designed into an immersive spatial sound installation (Hidden Notes Festival 2025).

FOMO - Jiajing Zhao (Running time: 07:11)

FOMO is an AI-aided acousmatic composition inspired by the experience of “Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).” FOMO is a psychological phenomenon describing the anxiety or unease one feels when believing others are having rewarding experiences they are missing out on. This phenomenon has become increasingly prevalent in the age of social media and digital communication. FOMO explores the painful addiction to information and the unsettling feeling of being overwhelmed by endless data streams.

Zhao Jiajing (赵嘉旌; family name–given name) is a London-based electroacoustic composer and sound artist from Beijing. His work spans acousmatic music, sound installation, performance, and new media, with a focus on spatial sound since 2019. He explores time, technological mediation, and our shifting relationship with digital and natural worlds, and often works across disciplines with visual art, theatre, science, and technology. His work has been presented at major venues and festivals such as Ars Electronica, IRCAM, ZKM Karlsruhe, ICMC, SICMF, eviMus, and ORF musikprotokoll. He has received recognitions and commissions from ISCM British Section, Musica Nova, Aesthetica × Audible, the Shanghai International Arts Festival, Musicacoustica, among others. Zhao holds an MA from the Royal College of Art and is pursuing a PhD at University of the Arts London.

Waterfell - Cameron J Laing (Running time: 10:00 excerpt)

Waterfell is a live improvisational stereo performance featuring the methodology of 'Natural Forms' using locally obtained environmental recordings as source audio. Created in 2025 in the village of Les Cars, France, during the 3-month research-based residency awarded by Brother the Charity and Creative Hub France. The take was recorded direct from the mixer.

Cameron J Laing is a British-Luxembourgish multi-disciplinary contemporary artist and musician whose transdisciplinary practice investigates the evolving relationship between nature, the environment and technology. With over 20 years of international experience, his career began in music after studying performance at the ACM, leading to major-label work as a Songwriter and Musician at renowned studios including Olympic, RAK, and EMI.

My Sweet Siren Sings - Hans-Martin Buff (Running time: 04:53)

My Sweet Siren Sings is a track from Hans-Martin Buff's 2024 album Tearjerkers, released as a single in 2025 from IAN Records. Tearjerkers was recorded at prestigious studios including Abbey Road, msm-studios in Berlin, and Real World Studios.

Hans-Martin Buff is a Grammy-winning recording engineer and music producer who worked as Prince's engineer at Paisley Park Studios for four years. An industry expert in immersive 3D audio., Buff won a Grammy for Best Immersive Audio Album for his Dolby Atmos mix of Peter Gabriel's I/o (2023), and Tearjerkers is currently nominated for Best Immersive Audio Album at the 2026 Grammy Awards.

Study for Kick Drum - Rob Lye (Running time: 03:28)

Study for Kick Drum layers a single, simple kick-drum rhythm ten times. Each iteration runs at a different BPM across a fixed duration of 360. Through gradual phase drift and temporal misalignment, the work reveals emergent rhythmic patterns that unfold over time.

The piece is rooted in the foundational ideas of early minimalism—particularly Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain—but extends these principles beyond linear time into a spatial register. Rather than focusing solely on phasing as a temporal phenomenon, the work treats rhythm as something that can be distributed, accumulated, and perceived spatially.

As the opening work in a larger body of research, Study for Kick Drum functions as a foundational experiment in multi-temporal composition, setting up a broader investigation into how differing temporalities can coexist, interfere, and expand across space.

Rob Lye (b. 1982, Wiltshire, UK) is an artist and musician based in London whose practice spans moving image, sound, and installation. His work explores the porousness of consciousness and the politics of landscape — how memory, ecology, and technology shape our perception of place and time.

A graduate of the Royal College of Art (2011), Lye’s recent works investigate sound as an embodied form of mourning and ecological listening. He combines ambisonic field recording, sculpture, and essayistic video to consider how histories of extraction, loss, and transformation reverberate through both material and psychic landscapes. He was one half of the seminal early-2000s noise duo Chora, performing internationally alongside artists such as Sonic Youth and Rhys Chatham.

Lye’s work has been presented at Café Oto, Iklectik, Modern Art Oxford, LUX, OUTPOST, and the ICA, among others. Lye is currently Artist in Residence at Gerald Moore Gallery (2025–2026), where he is developing a new ambisonic sound-led essay film in collaboration with the Music Department at Gerald Moore College.

Nexus Sonance - Mikołaj Tchórzewski (Miko) (Running time: 10 mins excerpt)

An immersive and interactive spatial audio installation that explores the sonic interplay between Cosmos, Earth, and Humans. Three interconnected sound worlds, each representing a different dimension of existence, create a unique point in space and time where we can experience the unity through sound.

The Cosmic layer (designed to be played back on an IKO speaker) is derived from sonified imagery made by the Euclid space telescope (ESA). Through spectral and algorithmic processes, granular and concatenative synthesis, visual astronomical data is transformed into expansive sonic textures, giving voice to otherwise inaudible forces of deep space.

The Earth layer is built from an original sound library recorded using contact microphones embedded in soil, sand, trees and similar habitats. These low-frequency vibrations and subtle microsonic details reveal a hidden auditory life of terrestrial environments-rhythms and pulses of the planet itself.

The Human layer features original recordings of the Georgian polyphonic choir ‘Adilei’. This ancient vocal traditions connects collective memory, ritual, and resonance. Their singing introduces a deeply embodied presence into the sonic ecosystem, bridging the cosmic and the terrestrial through breath, harmony, and human voice.

Designed for spatial audio playback with an IKO speaker at its core, Nexus Sonance offers a fully immersive listening experience with a grain of abstraction. The work proposes a contemplative, non-linear narrative, an acoustic continuum where the physical, the mythical, and the abstract converge in unified sonic language.

Mikołaj Tchórzewski (Miko) is a multidisciplinary artist with a main focus on spatial audio. Based in London his work, shaped by experiences from backpacking across different continents and cultures, explores the subjects of sound, space, mysticism and collective cultural identity within contemporary music and sound art practices. Moreover, taking inspiration from his experience as a live electronic-experimental performer, he puts special focus in creating work that’s abstract and evocative, cradling a new genre of experiences. Miko works professionally as a sound designer, spatial sound designer, recordist & spatial audio mixing engineer for various projects. He is founder of VizAion Immersive where his most recent work is a interactive choir installation at Victoria & Albert Museum in collaboration with Yamaha & CMMR 2025.

EMIKA - LIVE IMMERSIVE MUSIC PERFORMANCE 8:30pm to 9:30pm

“I hope she becomes very famous.” – Thom Yorke
“She is sonically out of this world.” – The Weeknd

Emika is our Immersive Audio Network Sound Artist-in-Residence for 2026. Emika will share insights she has gained from her funded residency alongside treating our ears to a solo spatial music performance followed by a Q & A.