Supported by:

At an intersection of composition, practice research, performance autoethnography, critical medical arts, and health humanities, my research primarily examines the creative possibilities for the development of corporeal acoustemology: a sonic and auditory knowledge of the body, health, and, therefore, illness. Recent projects include experimental approaches to Indian rhythmic theories combined with narrative elements of pathography to create a new, transdisciplinary form of composition which I describe as sonic life writing.

As a practice-based transdisciplinary researcher at SOAS University of London, I have developed projects which specifically challenge standardised cancer narratives and Karnatak rhythmic theory to consider new ways of sharing illness stories and biomedical information through sound and music. Important research questions in my work include:

⇢ How can we tell a story through rhythm? 

⇢ How can we learn about each other’s bodies through sound? 

⇢ How can we better understand disease through reparative listening?

My PhD thesis and portfolio of compositions are available here.

While life writing is an expanding field, especially in literature and film, its relationship with music is a nascent one within the academy; the possibilities of life writing beyond words are my focus in the composition of music and sonic arts.

My work closely engages with South Asian musics, konnakol, illness narratives, sonic arts, acoustemology, experimental composition, critical medical arts and health humanities, hospital radio, sonic life writing, expanded radio arts, reparative listening, and compositional process.

I am very grateful to the Fund for Women Graduates for their support and to the Royal Musical Association for recently awarding me the Thurston Dart Research Grant.

I am also developing a variety of artistic sonation and biophilic music and sonic art projects for which I have received an Oram Award for innovation in sound, music, and related technologies. For 2024, I am a new Women Make Music artist with PRS Foundation, working on an album of toxic and edible sounds from the Solanaceae family of plants.

Affiliations:

  • Musicians’ Union (MU)

  • Royal Musical Association (RMA)

  • Royal Society of Arts - fellowship (RSA)

  • Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM)

  • British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE)

  • Association for Medical Humanities (AMH)

  • Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH)