Salford Sound Symposium (30 June)
Please join us for our second sound symposium based at MediaCityUK, Salford. This interdisciplinary event features a range of speakers and practitioners working across film, TV, radio, music games and installations. The symposium will include live performance and demonstrations of practice-research.
Theory, practice, production, composition, collaboration, and innovation all combined in one unmissable event!
Speakers
Adam Hart
Dr Adam Hart’s areas of specialism are audio programming, studio composition and creative applications of technology. Having a background in education ranging from primary to higher learning, I have always been interested in the connection between technology and pedagogy. My PhD project ‘A Constructivist Approach to the Development of Interactive Digital Technology for Musical Learning’ was awarded a scholarship by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, and I am currently developing and testing a music composition app for children, Paynter
Alan Williams
Professor Alan Williams is a composer and writer on contemporary music and culture. He studied at the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester and at the Liszt Academy, Budapest. His music has been performed by world leading ensembles such as the BBC Philharmonic, the BBC Singers, the Philharmonia, and Psappha, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, MDR (Germany), NEC (Brazil) and Bartók Rádió (Hungary). As Professor of Collaborative Composition he is leading research partnerships with theBBC Philharmonic and with contemporary music group Psappha. He is the composer of the “world’s first Northern Opera”, the Arsonists, to a libretto by Ian McMillan.
Brona Martin
Dr Brona Martin is a composer and researcher within Creative Music Technology. Her research interests include soundscape composition, immersive surround sound technologies, acoustic ecology and community engagement. Her multi-channel electroacoustic works have included the creative exploration of soundscapes from Ireland, Manchester, West Coast Australia, Spain and Germany. Her works have been performed internationally at EMS, ACMC, ICMC, NYCEMF, ISSTA, L'Espace du Son, Balance/Unbalance, SSSP, iFIMPaC, BEAST FEaST and MANTIS. Brona is currently working with VR and Gaming technologies to create virtual spaces which will explore her research interests in acoustic ecology and spatial audio.
Giorgio Carlino
Giorgio Carlino is a composer and sound designer for XR and VR. He is specialised in audio synthesis and manipulation, which he uses to create rich music soundscapes or detailed audio assets to enhance the experience of multimedia products.
Billy Glew
Dr Billy Glew is a lecturer in Film Production at the University of Salford and is module leader for production and post-production sound modules on the BA Film Production course. Outside of the university, Billy works as a filmmaker, sound designer and sound mixer, with his work and collaborations featured at several international festivals including Toronto, Lebanon, Ukraine, Italy and UK. Billy's PhD was practice-research based and focused on dream sequences in film. Billy is currently in post-production with his short film Keith's Crash. Billy also runs a sound / film / rehearsal studio based in West Yorkshire.
Naomi Kashiwagi
Naomi Kashiwagi is an award-winning artist, musician, composer and creative producer and a Clore Leader based in Manchester, UK. Naomi has exhibited and performed across the UK and internationally. She produces visual art, sound works, music, compositions, graphic scores, installations, performances and events. Naomi’s practice provokes the fringes of disciplines and genres, the intersections and impacts of visual art, music, performance and everyday life upon one another and the cyclical nature of obsolescence and technological innovation. She explores the potential of things beyond their prescribed uses by poetically transforming their utilitarian and conceptual function. Naomi’s work often draws upon her dual heritage, an intrinsic fusion of two cultures, British and Japanese.
Paul Farrer
Paul Farrer is one of the UK’s most successful media composers. In a career spanning more than 30 years he has composed music for some of the biggest programmes on British television including The Chase, Dancing On Ice, Gladiators, Michael McIntyre’s Big Show, Ninja Warrior, Fort Boyard, Red Dwarf - The Promised Land, Gordon Ramsay’s Culinary Genius, Ant and Dec’s Push The Button, The Jerry Springer Show, Judge Rinder, The Krypton Factor and the BBC’s most successful international format of all time The Weakest Link, which was broadcast in 97 countries and over 12 years on British Television racked up 1693 episodes. In 2012 he was commissioned to compose all the music to the 100th Anniversary of the Royal Variety Performance at The Royal Albert Hall in the presence of Her Majesty The Queen. 2019 was the 8th year in a row he has been the composer of the orchestral music for this prestigious event. He is the recipient of an Ampex Golden Reel Award for his work on ITV’s The Gladiators was the 2003 recipient of the BMI Composer Award and has been twice nominated for a Royal Television Society Award.
Danny Saul
Danny Saul is a London-based composer working in film and television. He is co-composer for the No.1 Netflix show The Last Kingdom (2018-2023) as well as the feature length instalment Seven Kings Must Die (2023), alongside Lunn and multi-award-winning Faroese vocal sensation Eivor Palsdottir. The score for The Last Kingdom was performed in May 2023 in Copenhagen by the Danish Symphony Orchestra. His expertise in combining cutting edge electronics with evocative instrumental scores has made him a sought-after collaborator by several of the most in-demand composers working today, including two-time Emmy award winner John Lunn (Downton Abbey, Grantchester, Belgravia), Emmy award nominee Ruth Barrett (Sanditon, Bloodlands), and Grammy and Ivor Novello nominee Ben Onono (Ridley Road, Safe). Danny was awarded a PhD in music (2016) and a Masters in Music with Distinction (2012) from the University of Manchester.
Sara Parker
Sara Parker is an award-winning radio producer, working mainly for BBC Radio. Her montage style gives voice to individuals and communities, often covering hard-edged social issues from prostitution and pornography to teenage violence and suicide. Daughter of pioneering producer Charles Parker, one of Sara’s programmes explored the making of the Radio Ballads.
Sara has been a guest lecturer at the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago and at University of Westminster and Goldsmiths as well as a regular lecturer for BBC Radio Training. Her father’s archive is held at Birmingham Central Library and she is a founder trustee of the Charles Parker Archive Trust.
Katrina Porteous
Katrina Porteous is a freelance poet, historian and broadcaster, specialising in work on the theme of ‘nature’ in its widest sense, and ‘place’ in its deepest. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1960, she grew up near Consett in County Durham, graduated from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, with a first in History in 1982, and studied at Berkeley and Harvard Universities in the USA on a Harkness Fellowship. She has lived on the Northumberland coast since 1987 and is best-known for her innovative radio-poetry, which has been described by BBC Senior Producer Julian May as ‘extending the boundaries of the genre’. Her 2014 collection, Two Countries (Bloodaxe Books), was shortlisted for the Portico Prize and described as ‘one of the most distinctive and important collections of the year’ (Morning Star). Her most recent full collection, Edge (Bloodaxe Books, 2019) draws on her long involvement in scientific projects. In 2021 she was one of the Society of Authors’ Cholmondeley Award winners for Poetry. Katrina is President of the Northumbrian Language Society and the Coble and Keelboat Society, and is an ambassador for New Networks for Nature. She is a particularly strong performer of her own work, and has collaborated with both traditional and electronic musicians, including the late computer music pioneer Peter Zinovieff, leading Northumbrian piper Chris Ormston, and concertina virtuouso Alistair Anderson.
Adam Fowler
Adam has been making radio documentaries for nearly 25 years, mostly for BBC Radio 4 in the UK. In the course of his feature-making he has lived with Chukchi reindeer herders in the Russian Far Northeast, attended the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, recorded the ‘sounds’ of the Northern Lights in Alaska, and been the guest of several British prisons. He is particularly interested in the creative use of sound in documentary-making and has won several UK and international awards for his work.