Ella Kay
NOVARS, University of Manchester
Ella Kay is an electroacoustic composer, sound artist and designer, and saxophonist from Oldham currently based in Manchester. She is influenced by the intricacies of humanity and life, and her work aims to interpret these often-complicated areas through the realms of experimental sound. Ella graduated from The University of Manchester in 2019 with a MusB (hons) in Music where she was awarded the P.J. Leonard First Prize for her Electroacoustic Music final portfolio of works. She has returned to the university to study for a MusM Masters degree in Electroacoustic Composition and Interactive Media. In October 2022, The Radiophonic Institute recognised her work with an Oram Award including a Special Commendation bursary. Her music and research have been presented in MANTIS, Art’s Birthday 2023 @ E-Werk, Sonic Cartography 2022, SOUND/IMAGE 2022 (University of Greenwich), and EASTN-DC.
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2022-23
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Emma Clarke
PRisM, RNCM
Emma Clarke is a post-graduate research student at the Royal Northern College of Music. She studied for her Masters degree at Leeds Conservatoire. She’s worked with Opera North and is one of the 2022/23 Opus One composers with Britten Sinfonia. As well as writing for solo instruments, small ensembles and full orchestras, her work explores how the voice can express and conceal identity.
Emma is an award-winning pro voiceover whose work can be heard all around the world in commercials, games, apps, public transport systems and toys. She featured in the Hollywood blockbuster movie ‘Passengers’ alongside Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt where she played the role of a stricken starship.
She lives in Manchester with her family.
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2022-23
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Rosalía Soria
NOVARS, University of Manchester
Rosalia is a composer, bass player and electronics engineer. She studied composition at “Conservatorio de las Rosas” in Morelia, Mexico. She completed a master's in Electrical Engineering at the UMSNH in Mexico and a PhD in electroacoustic composition at the University of Manchester.
Her research interests include using state-space mathematical models in sound synthesis and live electronics, music for broader audiences, and sound for moving image. Her works include multichannel fixed media pieces, mixed media, and instrumental. They have been performed at the Mantis Festival (UK), Ars Electronica (Austria), Visiones Sonoras in Mexico, and ISSTC in Ireland, to mention a few.
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2022-23
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Rodrigo Constanzo
PRisM, RNCM
Rodrigo is Deputy Head of Popular Music Rodrigo Constanzo is a graduate of University of Huddersfield, where he gained a PhD in Music Composition.
With over 20 years experience as a music educator Rodrigo is also an active performer, composer, and improviser, having performed at various national and international gigs, venues, and festivals.
Rodrigo also co-runs The Noise Upstairs, an improvisation-based organisation that seeks to provide a platform for musicians interested in improvisation by promoting monthly events for over 10 years in Manchester. In this capacity he has run and hosted a number of workshops, and works as engineer and graphic designer for a small artist-centric label.
#UnS_COHORT: 2022-23
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Megan Steinberg
PRisM, RNCM
Megan Steinberg is an experimental composer and abstract turntablist based in London. She works with found sound, chance procedures, graphic scores, quietness and microtonality.
Originally a jazz guitarist, Megan studied Composition at Brunel University where she fell into experimental music. After discovering free improv using objects, violin and cello, in 2016 she began performing free improv and experimental music for single-deck, analogue turntable.
Megan is studying a PhD at Royal Northern College of Music, where she has been appointed the Lucy Hale Doctoral Composer in Association with Drake Music. Her project is focused on the creation of works for Disabled musicians, new instruments and AI.
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2021-22
Melanie Wilson
PRisM, RNCM
Melanie Wilson is a U.K. based multi-disciplinary performance maker. Her work is founded on the contemporary interplay between sound art, experimental forms of composition, language and live performance. As a writer, sound artist and composer Melanie collaborates with artists and companies across forms of theatre, film, installation and opera, in the U.K and internationally. She is one of Sound and Music’s New Voices 2020/21, funded by Arts Council England, PRS Foundation and Garfield Weston Foundation, and is partnering with PRiSM to develop a choral work that uses machine learning to explore the human connection with non-human species.
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2021-22
Artists and Scientists
Ellen Sargen
PRisM, RNCM
Ellen Sargen is a composer and flautist. She is Music Director for CoMA Manchester and since beginning her PhD in 2019, has coordinated fabric collective, a composer-performer group set up to create and perform new collaborative works centred around the unique identities of participants. Through this work Ellen strives for an inclusive space for diverse music-makers. This work often features personal narrative and is concerned with providing space for participants to develop their practice.
Ellen is an associate composer of University of York Music Press. Her music has been performed across the UK and abroad where she has worked with ensembles including Ligeti Quartet, Ensemble 360, Psappha, Ensemble Recherche, NoteBene etc. Recent commissions include those from National Opera Studio, Classical Sheffield Festival and Music in the Round (2018-2020). Ellen is a NWCDTP-funded PhD student studying at the Royal Northern College of Music and previously studied at the University of Sheffield (BMus, MA).
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2020-21
Vicky Clarke
NOVARS Artist in Residence. University of Manchester, UK
Vicky Clarke is a sound and electronic media artist from Manchester, UK. Working with sound sculpture, DIY electronics and human-machine systems, she explores our relationship to technology through sonic materiality, live AV and browser-based artwork. Vicky won the Oram Award 2020 for innovation in sound and music technology and is working towards her first album. She is currently artist in residence at NOVARS research centre, University of Manchester exploring musique concrete and machine learning. The residency builds on her AI research trip to St Petersburg/Moscow as a selected artist for UK-RUSSIA Year of Music, British Council and her project “MATERIALITY” exploring sound sculpture as a gestural and acoustic medium to interface the physical and digital; collaborating with researchers at the National Graphene Institute, she developed a conductive graphene performance interface for Ableton Live. Her work has featured on “SONIC FUTURES: How technology is guiding electronic music”, British Council and “Artist DIY” for FACT magazine in 2020. As director of Noise Orchestra and as a solo artist Vicky has performed/exhibited with National Science & Media Museum, MUTEK, CTM, Q02 and is an AMPLIFY DAI artist, a programme connecting the work of women artists in UK, Argentina and Canada supported by MUTEK, Somerset House Studios and British Council. auramachine
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2020-21
Nina Whiteman
PRisM, RNCM
Nina Whiteman is a composer, multimedia artist and vocalist based in Manchester, UK.
Recent work has drawn inspiration from mazes and labyrinths, placing performers and audience in disorienting spaces and employing maze-like semi-graphic notation and video scores (House of Mazes, TOMB, Everything near becomes distant).
Her music has been performed widely in the UK and abroad by ensembles such as the BBC Philharmonic, Manchester Camerata, Quatuor Danel, Dutch accordion duo TOEAC, Ealing Youth Orchestra, Psappha, Colinton Amateur Orchestra (Adopt-a-composer scheme), Riot Ensemble, and Distractfold Ensemble. Current projects include research and development of a new opera with writer Nadifa Mohamed at the Royal Opera House.
Nina is singer in and co-director of Trio Atem (flute, mezzo, cello), who specialise in performances of new and recent repertoire with an emphasis on commissioning new work and cross-genre projects. She is also Artistic Director of Manchester Contemporary Youth Opera, an organisation she co-founded to trailblaze creation of new opera by and for 18-25 year-olds.
Work in education and the community has included leading several projects for Manchester Camerata’s Learning and Participation programme, project work for Streetwise Opera, and teaching at The University of Manchester, RNCM, and Lancaster University. She currently teaches at the RNCM and is Lecturer in Composition at Royal Holloway (University of London).
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2021-22
Bofan Ma
PRisM, RNCM
Bofan Ma is a Manchester-based composer-performer and multidisciplinary artist. Originally from China, he makes music that embodies an intricate entanglement between sound and performative actions, as well as a normalised, transnational creative identity. He has worked with ensembles/initiatives including Shanghai Conservatory Chinese Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Psappha, Ensemble Mise-en, Ensemble X.y, Vonnegut Collective, Music Theatre Wales, Kinetic Manchester. His music has been heard across the globe, namely in the Shanghai Spring International Festival (China); Mise-en International Festival (USA); Hearing Art Seeing Sound International Festival (Armenia); and Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Germany). Having recently finished a PhD at the Royal Northern College of Music, Bofan currently works at the RNCM Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music (PRiSM) as a Post-doctoral Research Associate. He is also one of the core members of both the composer collective The Incógnito Project, as well as the Manchester branch of the international Contemporary Music for All (CoMA) network.
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2021-22
Zakiya Leeming
PRisM, RNCM
Zakiya Leeming is a doctoral composer at the Royal Northern College of Music and member of PRiSM (Centre for Practice and Research in Science and Music). Zakiya’s research explores composition informed by science and technology through ongoing collaborations with scientists, health data researchers and performers. A new work for ISARIC4C, an international consortium of scientists whose outputs informed the UK government on COVID-19, will be featured in Future Music #3. Other commissions include Psappha, Explore Ensemble, Bury Choral Society, Aurora Percussion Duo and more. Zakiya was the recipient of the Examiner Newspaper Scholarship and the Dean's award for Excellence with Honours during her undergraduate degree at the University of Tasmania. In her Masters degree at the RNCM, Zakiya was awarded the Soroptimists International Manchester Award in Composition, The Edward Hecht Prize and a Gold Medal in composition. Zakiya is founding co-director of composer collective Incógnito and is currently working on a piece for Ensemble Recherche in collaboration with University of Liverpool Chemist Professor Mathias Brust.
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Robert Laidlow
PRisM, RNCM
Robert Laidlow is a composer and performer based in London and Manchester. His music has been performed and broadcast worldwide and has received awards including the Royal Philharmonic Society Composers Prize 2019 and nomination for the 2020 and 2018 British Composer Awards.
Robert's work often incorporates scientific, engineering or mathematical collaboration. Robert is the PRiSM Researcher in AI-Assisted Composition in association with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, who have performed a number of his works. Recently he has been commissioned by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Echea Quartet, guitarist Fabio Zanon, the International Festival of Campos do Jordao, and Access Contemporary Music Chicago among others. His works have been broadcast several times on BBC Radio 3 and his music was also recently televised on BBC Four as part of the Royal Institution's popular Christmas Lectures annual series.
Tywi J H Roberts
PRisM, RNCM
Tywi John Hywel Roberts is a composer and performer from South Wales. He has written for groups such as Psappha, Festivo Winds and the Nexus Duo. In 2019 he was the joint winner of the Rosamond Prize competition for his collaboration with poet Samantha Weaver.
Tywi’s work frequently incorporates innovative technologies, and he has created pieces involving virtual reality, live coding, super low-latency streaming technology, and multiple laptops. In February 2020 he was the musical director of the premiere performance of the UnHeard Hybrid Orchestra, and played a similar role in 2021’s UnHeard Hybrid Online, which headlined the first RNCM PLAY Festival.
Earlier in his career Tywi was part of Bristol post-rock band A Procession, and earlier still he studied a Master’s in Sonic Art & Digital Media Production at the University of Sheffield with Professor Adrian Moore. Since 2005, he has also spent a number of years working in the context of Robert Fripp’s Guitar Craft seminars.
Tywi’s current PhD research at the Royal Northern College of Music (supervised by Mauricio Pauly, Larry Goves and Rodrigo Constanzo) is focused around mapping the methodologies of digital composition over to the acoustic space, and exploring this work through hybrid electronic/acoustic ensembles.
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2020-21
Tasos Asonitis
NOVARS, University of Manchester, UK
Tasos Asonitis is an audiovisual artist whose activities encompass various facets of digital arts. His primary interest is on immersive virtual environments that can be described by the creative entanglement of computer generated music and 3D graphics. His work deals particulary with non-anthropocentric themes and attempts to examine objects outside of their assigned referentiality. Asonitis' artistic output however is not limited to the audiovisual domain, and includes multi-channel fixed media pieces, sonic installations and compositions for moving image. Recipient of the EPSRC doctoral scholarship, he is currently doing a PhD in Composition at NOVARS Research Center.
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2020-23
Chris Rhodes
NOVARS, University of Manchester, UK
Chris Rhodes is a Manchester-based composer of Electroacoustic music. Studying at NOVARS Research Centre (University of Manchester), he is a final year PhD candidate in Music Composition investigating the use of biometric data to stimulate interactive music and art. His work does this through the use of wearable sensor technologies and the latest developments in machine learning (ML) processes within music. His music has been performed internationally, enjoying a recent performance of his work at the 16th Sound and Music Computing conference. His research regarding the application of ML to music composition is award-winning.
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2020-21
Hongshuo Fan
NOVARS, University of Manchester, UK
Hongshuo Fan 范弘硕 (b.1990) is a Chinese cross-disciplinary composer, new media artist and creative programmer. He is completing his PhD at NOVARS, The University of Manchester.
His work has involved various real-time interactive multimedia contents, such as acoustic instruments, live electronics, generative visuals, light and body movements. His research and creative interest focus on the fusion of traditional culture and cutting-edge technology in the form of contemporary art. His output spans chamber music, live interactive electronics, installations, and audio-visual works.
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2020-21
Jason Dominguez
Computer Science, University of Manchester
Jason is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Manchester in Machine Learning for Music
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2021-22
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Tom Baker
Computer Science, University of Manchester
Tom is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Manchester in Machine Learning for Music
#UnS_COHORT: COHORT: 2021-22
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