May 2023

A String Quartet written as part of my undergraduate degree at the University of Liverpool. This piece was subsequently premiered by the Solem Quartet in a concert at Liverpool's Tung Auditorium in May 2023. The inspiration behind the name of the piece came from a lyric in the song ‘Hope There’s Someone’ by Anohni and the Johnsons. To me, the phrase represents a sort of liminal space, or a dissociative sensation, and I think it captures the essence of the piece quite aptly. To me, this piece represents the experience of feeling lost or adrift and, through effort, space, and time, finding a way to get your feet back on the ground, once again in control of your life; however, I deliberately tried to allow a subjectivity into the work that will give listeners the opportunity to decide what it means to them.

March 2022

A woodwind trio written as part of my undergraduate studies towards a Bachelor's degree at the University of Liverpool. The piece was inspired by the works of Debussy, Poulenc, and Ferroud.

Coming Soon

An Irish language short film adapted from the story 'Sea Monster', written & directed by Dr Bernadette McBride. Translated & narrated by Máire Uí Dhufaigh. Starring Frances McManus.

"A retired forensic ecologist holds the key to solving an environmental crime on the Aran islands, but does she remember?"

November 2023

A piece commissioned by Delia Derbyshire Day and Brighter Sound, in partnership with the National Lottery Heritage Fund, to celebrate the legacy of Delia Derbyshire and Doctor Who. This project was a collaboration between myself and visual artist, Alexis Maxwell, and has since been added to the Delia Derbyshire Archive at Manchester's John Ryland's Library. 

Musically, the track was inspired by Derbyshire's Inventions For Radio, in which she harnessed the voices of real individuals to aurally explore contemporary perceptions of God and faith. Building on this concept, Alexis and I conducted interviews with members of the local community, using these real-life narratives as the foundation for a science-fiction that remains rooted in real perspectives. The use of recorded human voices, divorced from their sources, places the cognitive dissonance detailed in R. M. Schafer’s notion of ‘Schizophonia’, and Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of ‘acousmatics’, directly in view; the sound of human voices, so familiar, yet dismembered and robbed of their autonomy, is profoundly jarring. 

I was particularly inspired by Delia’s working notes from the John Rylands Archive to explore new methods of generating musical material. For example, many of the sounds heard throughout the track, and the rhythm of the main Doctor Who-esque melody, are a spelling of Delia’s name in morse code. In addition to this, much of the harmony used in the track is built on the mode that results from the numericisation of the spelling of Delia's first name (D=4, E=5, L=12, I=9, A=1). 

May 2022

A rescore of the 'Kronos' scene from The Incredibles, using only free plug-ins and virtual instruments.

Jan 2021

‘Once, Upon Time’ was inspired by mechanical and industrial works such as Étude Pathétique by Pierre Schaeffer, Time Will Tell by Manuella Blackburn, and Internal Clock by Monolake. I was particularly inspired by Manuella Blackburn’s work to compose a piece entirely devoted to the concept of time passing.

I attempted to treat my entire composition as a large-scale 'sound object', comprising many smaller 'sounds objects', by opening the piece with a section intended to represent birth/infancy, ending the piece with a section intended to represent death, and having the middle take the listener on a journey through life. If I were to attach the structural function names, as defined by Denis Smalley (Spectromorphology), to the three sections of my composition, I would name birth as ‘emergence’, the main body of the composition as ‘passage’, and death as ‘release’ or ‘disappearance’. This ‘journey’ from birth, through life, to death is the overall concept of ‘Once, Upon Time’.