Sound Artist Residencies
2027 Sound Artist Residency
“There is no other community this inspiring for immersive music development”
- Emika
“I would highly recommend the Immersive Audio Network Sound Artist Residency”
- Nikki Sheth
“The Immersive Audio Network residency provided two of the most important necessities for any artist: Time and space”
- Ulf
Applications have now closed.
If selected, you will receive:
- 3 days exclusive use of our mobile Immersive Audio Lab including free access to specialist spatial audio technical support.
- £1500 Artist stipend to fund your time, travel and subsistence on the residency.
- Public exhibition of your work-in-progress developed during the residency as an artist's talk at our Immersive Audio Network Festival on 29th January 2027 at the Arnolfini in Bristol, UK.
The residency will take place in-person in Bristol in an accessible venue over 3 days between 15th and 21st January 2027 on 3 days that suit you the artist best agreed with our Network's technical team in advance.
Please note we are unable to provide individual feedback on each submitted application.
w/c 2nd November 2026: the recipient will be contacted to confirm their acceptance of the funded residency.
This sound artist residency is supported by MyWorld, The Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (CCCI) at Bath Spa University and our Immersive Audio Network.
Emika
2026 Sound Artist Resident
“There is no other community this inspiring for immersive music development” - Emika
Tell us about you and your work
Hi I am Ema (artist name Emika) and I have been combining Classical and Electronic to form my own 'Emika' sound-world which is heavily informed by creative implementation of immersive music technology. I like lots of bass, moody harmonies, unusual sound combinations, and extreme sonic contrasts. I run my own label Emika Records and my projects are often crowd-funded or supported by patrons of my work.
How did the IAN Residency help you develop your work?
The residency encouraged me to work outside of my comfort zone, to test frameworks in a new site-specific musical environment, with the performance/presentation requiring focused execution of the ideas in a short time frame, in order to be able to engage with an audience and share everything.
Where has your work gone on tour?
Planetariums, cinemas, immersive studios, fulldome festivals, are all coming up through 2026+2027.
What else would you like to say?
The IAN is made up of pro audio specialists and heavy-weights, who come together to share their knowledge and passion for immersive audio and music. Combined with their creative vision and audience development, is it a great space for artists and audiences alike to come together and explore new immersive music possibilities.
WEBSITE: www.emikarecords.com
Nikki Sheth
2025 Sound Artist Resident
“I would highly recommend the Immersive Audio Network Sound Artist Residency” - Nikki Sheth
Tell us about you and your work
Nikki Sheth is an internationally recognised sound artist and composer. 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. 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 (2024). 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.
In 2024, Nikki spent five months exploring nocturnal soundscapes across three UNESCO biosphere reserve sites in Queensland, Australia as part of the Refinery Natural Ecologies Artist Residency. Australia is home to between 7-10% of all species on Earth and a great number of these are nocturnal. This piece reveals sounds of nocturnal wildlife that largely go unheard throughout the night, highlighting the role sound can play in enhancing ecological awareness and monitoring biodiversity of nocturnal species.
How did the IAN Residency help you develop your work?
The Immersive Audio Network Residency gave me the time and facilities to finish composing this piece and work on a 25-channel version on the Immersive Audio Network speaker array.
Where has your work gone on tour?
The work in progress was shared at Bath Spa University at the end of the residency and then at Bath Digital Festival. Since then it has been played at The Global Composition in Darmstadt, Germany and was runner up for the Wildlife Sound Recording Society Competition in the Creative Class.
What else would you like to say?
I would highly recommend the Immersive Audio Network Sound Artist Residency. The team is very supportive and the residency gives you the time, space and facilities to develop your immersive practice. After the residency they provided many opportunities to still be involved with the network and have continued to support my practice.
Ximena Alarcón & Ulf A.S. Holbrook
2024 Sound Artist Residents
“The Immersive Audio Network residency provided two of the most important necessities for any artist: Time and space” - Ulf
Tell us about you and your work
Ximena Alarcón-Díaz composes immersive listening experiences exploring alternative forms for sensing place and telepresence to sound collectively our sonic migrations. She has a PhD in Music Technology and Innovation, and studied with Pauline Oliveros the Deep Listening® practice. She has created the online environment Sounding Underground (The Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship-IOCT DMU, 2007-2009), the telematic sonic improvisations Networked Migrations ( CRiSAP 2011-2017), the INTIMAL system, Interfaces for Relational Listening (Marie S Curie IF, RITMO - U of Oslo, 2017-2019), and the surround-sound installations Unravelling/Desenredando (IAN Award, 2023), and Huellas de Aire (MAMM Commission, 2024). In her latest works, she explores breathing as an emotional bridge for telepresence, expanding people’s aural territories of memory and emotion.
Ulf A. S. Holbrook is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working with sound in a variety of media, including composition, improvisation, installation, programming, text, and research; with a specific interest of the representation of place and space through spatial audio, recording technologies, speaker design, geo-spatial methods, sonification, and software. He studied sculpture at the Glasgow School of Art, music technology at the University of Limerick, and holds a PhD in music technology from the University of Oslo. He currently works as an acoustic consultant and is involved with a series of artistic and research projects internationally. https://www.u-l-v.org/
Unravelling/Desenredando - Immersive listening to Colombian women’s voices.
Unravelling/Desenredando is a surround-sound bilingual installation (Spanish and English) featuring the voices of nine Colombian women from varied backgrounds, listening to and resonating with each others’ stories of their migratory journeys to Europe. Improvising in trios, they weave a multilayered sonic memory of intense and intimate listening, while sounding their experiences of how migration and conflict are heard through their bodies: their social spaces of interaction, the memory of conflict in their native land, and the challenges met in the countries where they now live.
The installation invites audiences to be immersed in these women’s individual experiences and find resonances in the overlaps and synchronicities, as they might also meet across universal narratives between gender, conflict and migration.
LINK TO WEBSITE: https://www.ximenaalarcon.net/unravelling
LINK TO DOCUMENTARY IN VIMEO: https://vimeo.com/1043519278
LINK TO TRAILER: https://vimeo.com/1042538217
How did the IAN Residency help you develop your work?
The Immersive Audio Network (IAN) Residency awarded in 2023, helped to consolidate the Unravelling/Desenredando surround sound installation, which emerged from the INTIMAL project (Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship 2017 - 2019), and which I worked in collaboration with the Oslo-based composer and spatial audio researcher (specialising in ambisonics and wave field synthesis) Ulf A. S. Holbrook. The IAN residency supported Ulf travelling to Bath, and to have two weeks of paid time to listen together to the voices we had recorded in 2018 and 2019, and work collaboratively in the composition. We used the brand new IAN sound spatialisation system at The Studio, and also at the TV Studio at Bath Spa University. We showed a headphone version for general audiences at The Studio and explored ways to tour the work.
Where has your work gone on tour?
Unraveling/Desenredando went on tour to three venues across the world: Arnolfini, Bristol (England); the International Festival of the Image, Bogotá and Manizales (Colombia); SARC: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music, at the Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast, (Northern Ireland). The tour was funded by the Four Nations International Fund through Arts Council England, Arts Council Northern Ireland, Arts Council Wales, Creative Scotland and Wales Arts International, in partnership with Arnolfini - Bristol (England), the Immersive Audio Network - IAN (South West of England), My World, Centre for Creative and Cultural Industries (Bath Spa University), the Festival Internacional de la Imagen - Bogotá and Manizales (Colombia), SARC: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music, at the Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast, (Northern Ireland), and the Facultad de Artes, Universidad de Antioquia (Medellín, Colombia). Unravelling was also presented at the Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research conference, UCL, London, in 2025.
What else would you like to say?
Ximena: Working on the completion of Unravelling/Desenredando expanded my listening of the many layers of memory brought about by the improvisation I composed in the project INTIMAL(2018), with nine women’s individual and collective recall of their migratory journeys. Composing it through two dedicated weeks of collaborative listening with Ulf A.S. Holbrook during the IAN residency, helped me to understand better spatialisation through ambisonic techniques for surround sound systems, and how these shape the space in which women’s voices are heard by audiences. Touring in three different international venues, the work came alive also expanding audiences’ listening about Colombian migration, and about migration as a world wide experience. Unravelling/Desenredando supported a way of listening collectively to fragmented stories of migration and conflict, through a careful unfolding of a collective sonic emotional experience.
Ulf: The Immersive Audio Network residency provided two of the most important necessities for any artist: Time and space. Time and space to develop work, to think, to listen, to reflect, and to produce. Developing multichannel installations is more akin to a philosophy than sound engineering and mixing - it requires an awareness and attunement to create the physical sonic space from where people experience and understand what they are hearing. Weaving stories of migration, conflict, personal and collective lives lived, and presenting it purely through sound, required us to spend countless hours listening deep into layers of histories, and this could only have been possible by being given time and space to listen, to think, and to develop the work one small fragment at a time.
Photography: Aline Soares