Creating explorative interdisciplinary projects in rural Australia with a focus on architecture, music, arts, design, and environment.

For more than fifteen years Clocked Out have produced some of Australia's most innovative contemporary music and interarts projects. Through their varied collaborations they have sought to bring together musicians, performers, artists and audiences from diverse backgrounds. By following their creativity to unexpected places, their work has explored the boundaries between musical styles and artistic disciplines. They are winners of the 2011 APRA Art Music Award for Excellence by an Organisation.

The Piano Mill, a cross-disciplinary, collaborative project that investigates the sonic properties of materials and musical instruments and their creative influence in composing for, designing and building site-specific works. The project also draws on cultural history for inspiration and context, specifically focussing on the history of pianos in outback Queensland.

While architectural design is primarily driven by visual considerations, acoustic properties of buildings have a major impact on how people experience them. Bringing together interdisciplinary expertise from industry and academia in architecture, acoustics, music performance, and research, 'Out of the auditory' investigates the current state of conceptual thinking, research and practice in aural architecture. The recognition of aural aspects of architecture is ancient, but they are re-emerging in practice and research in new ways this innovative project will explore in an interdisciplinary collaboration. An edited scholarly publication based on a curated lecture series and an exhibition of designs are proposed outcomes of the project in its first year.

I investigate the way we use metaphor to describe sound and sound production in music, as well as sound in the environment around us. The investigation began as a PhD study of metaphor used by music teachers to teach expressive playing in advanced instrumental instruction across a broad repertoire of western art music. The study showed that there are structures and patterns in the use of metaphor that suggest conventionalised concepts underlie the way we perceive musical sound, and therefore, even underlie the way we appreciate music. For example, prominent in my study were notions of shape, form, and size, and the way we move and orientate ourselves in the space around us. The vocabulary associated with these notions is embedded in the language of classical music. But there are many ‘musics’ in the world and how the sounds of those musics are perceived, conceived, and described varies. So what is the nature of metaphor across other musical genres and cultures and their languages? What does this tell us about similarities and differences in music perception around the world? These questions have implications that are far reaching culturally, socially, historically, ecologically, and politically. I propose that they even concern how we listen to, hear, and therefore how we interact with our natural and built environment.Through further research, I aim to address these questions by investigating the notion cross- culturally and across disciplines to illuminate how people describe their experience of sound.This is an ongoing research project. It will have different iterations under the banner Expressions: Sharing Lexicons of Music and Sound and I look forward to possible collaborations.June, 2014