Drawing upon the situational knowledges of practice research, my thesis investigates the capacity of sound to observe and give voice to changing ecosystems: specifically, the Northern Irish peatlands and the ‘singing’ sand dunes of the Rub’ al Khali desert (UAE). The research is grounded in materials gathered through in-situ fieldwork, from which my compositional practice explores different soundings of these environments. ​

The new insights that these methods of sonic practice yield open dialogue between environmental humanities and sciences, interrogating the need for different situated sensings of the ‘Anthropocene’. From the wetlands to the drylands, my PhD proposes strategies for the doing of sound, (or cultivating particular modes of sounding through practice), asking how we can listen through colonial legacies and extractivist paradigms to present day relations between humans and nonhuman environments, and reflecting on how both sounding and refusing to sound environments shape relations of power, difference, and resistance.

My recent Master's thesis at the University of Cambridge was an exploration of architecture and acoustics through composition, looking at how spaces manifest sound, and how music creates and shapes space through its acoustic properties and cultural codes.