Cat Hope

Cat is an academic with an active profile as a composer, sound artist and musician.  She is the director of the award winning music ensemble, Decibel, and has toured internationally.  Her composition and performance practices explore the physicality of sound in different media, and her compositions have been recorded for Australian, German and Austrian national radio, with her work being awarded numerous prizes including the APRA/AMC Award for Excellence in Experimental Music.  Cat has collaborated with Australian visual artists such as Tracy Moffat, Kate McMillan, Erin Coates and Tina Havelock-Stevens, and she has written work for the London Improvisers Orchestra amongst others.

Professor Cat Hope maintains her practice as a composer, musician, sound artist, curator and artistic director of the Decibel music ensemble. Research interests include graphic and animated notation, electronic music performance practice, low frequency sound, Australian contemporary music, digital music archiving, improvisation, noise music, gender equity, and music technologies. Hope has strengths in supervising projects that engage artistic research and projects that work with industry partners.  

As someone who maintains a current performance and composition profile, Hope enjoys collaborating with industry partners as well as engaging in more traditional research. Hope welcomes working with a broad range of postgraduate projects and taking part in research culture.  

Completed PhDs include:

• "Spectromorphology and Spatiomorphology: Wave Terrain Synthesis as a Framework for Controlling Timbre Spatialisation in the Frequency Domain." Stuart James.
• "Pedagogy in Performance: An Investigation into Decision Training as a Cognitive Approach to Circus Training." Jon Burtt
• "Music In Site: Interating Elements of Site -specificity into Composition." Mace Francis
• "Sighting Circus: Perceptions of Circus Phenomena investigated through Diverse Bodies" Katie Lavers
• "What remains is the Book: The Idea of the Book in and around Electronic Space." Adam Simonato
• 'Writing as Dancing: The Dancer in you Hands: A Novella" Jo Pollit"
• "The Grain of the Digital Workstation" Michael Terren
• "Giving voice to the extra-normal self with the extra-normal voice: Improvised exploration through the realms of shamanic chaos magick, insight meditation and gender performance" Sage Harlow
• "Re-Composing Feminism: Australian Women Composers in the New Millennium". Talisha Goh
  
  

Cat Hope's Impact and Engagement profile is extensive, and includes:

• 2019 Appearance at the Melbourne Writes Festival, with Karina Utomo,in 'Duets' series.
• 2018 Peggy Glanville Hicks Address in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide
• 2018 Keynote at the International Conference on Technologies of Music notation and representation, Montral, Canada.
• 2017 Keynote given at the Women in the Creative Arts Conference, ACT
• 2016 Keynote given at the International Sound & Music Computing Conference, Germany
• 2015 Keynote given at the Australasian Computer Music Conference in Sydney, Australia

Cat also serves on a number of industry panels, including Vice President of the Deans and Directors of Creative Arts (2019 - ), Peer panel member of Cretive Victoria (2018-), Bloomsbury Popular Music editorial advisory board (2019-), Bundanon Trust (2018-), APRA Professional Development Awards (2017-),  Vice President of the Australasian Computer Music Assocation (2014-2019)); Witness for the Senate Enquiry into Federal Arts Funding (2016), and as a Peer Panel Member to the Australian Council for the Arts' music and experimental arts panels over a number of years since 2008.