Dr Brian Bridges

Overview

Brian Bridges is Senior Lecturer in Music and Creative Audio, and has served as Research Director for Music, Drama, Performing Arts and Film/Screen Studies since 2017.

He led Ulster’s submission to the UK REF (Research Excellence Framework) 2021 assessment, which saw his unit being ranked joint first in the UK for research impact. He is a composer/sonic artist, electronic musician and arts-technology researcher, having graduated from Trinity College Dublin (MPhil in Music and Media Technologies, 2003) and National University of Ireland, Maynooth (BA in English and Music, 2001; PhD in Music, 2013), in addition to private studies in the US with Glenn Branca (2005) and Tony Conrad (2006), supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Research fields include composition and installation practices, musical HCI, sound design, modular synthesis, soundtrack studies, microtonality, and spatial/immersive music.

Particular research interests include embodiment and environment in creative practices and technologies, as well as the various ways in which music and sound evoke, or sometimes challenge, concepts and experience of materiality, agency, and presence.

Research Interests

I am interested in the application of embodied and perceptual models to musical practices, sound design, and the design of performance systems and interfaces, as well as immersive audio/music practices. Essentially, I see these interests as inhabiting the crossroads between music and sound, our instruments, our technologies, and our broader experience of the world.

I have published in the proceedings of New Interfaces for Musical Expression, International Conference on Auditory Display, International Computer Music Conference, in journals such as the Journal of Sonic Studies and the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, and in volumes on sound design published by Routledge (including Focal Press) and Springer.

I currently serve on the editorial board of Organised Sound (Cambridge). I was previously Vice-President (2015-17) and President (2017-19) of ISSTA, the Irish Sound, Science, and Technology Association during a period of expansion which saw it gain significant international reach (with participants from three continents), as well as serving on the board of open access journals Interference: a Journal of Audio Culture (2014-23) and Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2019-23).

My creative outputs include sound–based spatial/immersive installations, audiovisual pieces, and electroacoustic and acoustic composition, with particular interests in microtonal and drone music.

My work has been programmed at festivals in Europe, the Americas and China, receiving support and commissions from arts organisations including the Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland, the Contemporary Music Centre and Resonance FM, and I was active in (and was a co-founder of) the Dublin-based Spatial Music Collective from 2006-17.

Recent performances include Huddersfield and Belfast festivals in 2023, and the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival in 2024.

Other interests include connections across the art-technology and arts-science divide, and I co-founded the Hearts of STEM (2016-18) and Oscillations and Modulations conference-festivals (2018-present), the latter being the first conference-festival on the island of Ireland devoted to modular synthesis and related practices.

I am leading on the £460k+ Presence Lab project at Ulster’s Derry~Londonderry campus (funded by the Higher Education Research Capital scheme, with majority from NI DfE) and I am also a co-investigator within the AHRC CoSTAR (Convergent screen technologies and performance in realtime) network.

I am interested in hearing from potential collaborators or PhD students with ideas related to the topics above.

Research Opportunities