Brian Bridges is a music and sonic arts and arts–technology researcher from Dublin, Ireland.
He is currently Senior Lecturer in Music and Creative Audio at Ulster University in Derry, Northern Ireland, where where he has served as Research Director for Music, Drama, Performing Arts and Film/Screen Studies since 2017.
His primary interests lie in how we create with––and through––technologies, with key theoretical contexts including embodied cognition, technological affordances, and cybernetic models, focusing on how embodiment, materiality, cross–modality and spatial immersion shape musical and sonic experiences.
With practice–research interests centred on the intersection of creativity and technology, his creative output spans modular synthesis, composition for acoustic instruments and electronics, and spatial electroacoustic music and installation practices, with particular interests in microtonality and drones, as well as broader questions of musical embodiment. His music has been featured at festivals in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, including New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Spectrum (NYC), Spring in Havana, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, International Music Week (Lüneberg, DE), the Beijing Irish New Music Festival, and Irish festivals and concert series including Kontakt at Unit 44 (IE), Ergodos Festival, Dublin Electronic Arts Festival, Dublin Fringe Festival, Belfast International Arts Festival and CMC Culture Night.
His publications are in leading specialist fora including the proceedings of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), and journals including Journal of Sonic Studies and the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, and volumes on sound design, sound spatialisation, and sound in interaction published by Routledge (including Focal Press) and Springer.
Broader research interests include interdisciplinary connections between arts/humanities and STEM. He currently serves on the board of the Void Art Centre, Derry, and previously served as Vice-President and President of the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association, co-hosting four international academic conference-festivals 2016-2019. He co-founded Ireland’s first loudspeaker ensemble, the Spatial Music Collective (2006–2018), Hearts of STEM arts-science festival (Belfast and Derry: 2016–18), and Derry’s Oscillations and Modulations festival of synthesisers and DIY electronic music techniques (2018–present), the latter being the first event of its type on the island. Brian also currently serves on the editorial board of Organised Sound and was a previous editor for Interference: a Journal of Audio Culture and the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland.
If you would like to make contact with Brian, please email him at bd [dot] bridges [at] ulster [dot] ac [dot] uk