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.  Her 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."
• "Pedagogy in Performance: An Investigation into Decision Training as a Cognitive Approach to Circus Training."
• "Music In Site: Interating Elements of Site -specificity into Composition."
• "Sighting Circus: Perceptions of Circus Phenomena investigated through Diverse Bodies"
• "What remains is the Book: The Idea of the Book in and around Electronic Space."

Current doctoral researrch projects include:

• "The reintroduction of the Trautonium: Archiving early electronic instruments for performance."
• Three Australian Women Composers on the World Stage: The Early Works and International Careers of Ros Bandt, Liza Lim and Kate Moore."
• "Animating Notation for Digital Score Delivery."

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

• 2017 Keynote given at the Women in the Creative Arts Conference, ACT
• 2017 Working on a joint production called Speechless, based on the Australian Human Rights Commissions' 'Forgotten Children' report of 2014
• 2016 Keynote given at the International Sound & Music Computing Conference, Germany
• 2015 Keynote given at the Australasian Computer Music Conference in Sydney
• 2014 APRA/AMC National Award for Excellence in Music
• 2013 Peggy Glanville Hicks Composers House Residency, Australian Council for the Arts

Cat also serves on a number of industry panels, including Vice President of the Australasian Computer Music Assocation (2014-); 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.