Garth’s principle current research project is the Listen(n) Project, which is an interdisciplinary collaborative project that explores remote embodied landscapes of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves through sound. The project focuses on community awareness, sustainability, environmental engagement, critical enquiry and interpretative discourse around questions of how digital technology and rich media environments can be used to create experiences of being present in remote environments.
Specifically, the Listen(n) Project brings together creative placemaking and citizen science to build stewardship and community agency in the care, maintenance and long-term planning for iconic environments. Listenn focuses on exploring and documenting the sonic makeup of these environments through creative and scientific activities. Communities will engage in workshops around listening modes and sound recording, leading to place-inspired creative endeavors to produce community art whilst engaging in citizen science through participatory data collection and ecosystem monitoring programs. The two streams go hand-in-hand and produce sound, music and media artworks as well as scientific databases and sound maps that are informed by a deep knowledge of the local ecosystems. Each year, on-location workshops will be held, working directly with the local communities and other interested participants. These workshops will be coordinated by the local management agency, which will also hold shared field recording equipment provided by the project and maintain the volunteer roster for monthly recording sessions at geo-located positions within the site. The Listen(n) project will provide an online portal to build an active community, providing an upload space for audio recordings, photographs and discussion about the acoustic ecology of each site, independently for each community.
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Over the past decade, Garth Paine established and convened the International Workshop on Interactive Systems in Performance (WISP), The sonic residues festival and the 2010 symposium on somatic embodiment Agency in mediation (SEAM2010) with Margie Medlin of Critical Path. Each of these events focuses on interactive performance systems and electroacoustic music.
Garth established and directed the Virtual, Interactive, Performance Research environment (VIPRe) . He is particularly fascinated with sound as an exhibitable object. This passion has led to several interactive responsive environments where the inhabitant generates the sonic landscape through their presence and behavior. It has also led to several music scores for dance works, generated through realtime video tracking and or bio-sensing of the dancers. His work has been shown throughout Australia, Europe, Japan, USA, South America, Hong Kong and New Zealand.
MAP1 from Garth Paine on Vimeo.
Garth lead the Taxonomy of Interfaces/Instruments for Electronic Music performance (TIEM) projects with partners McGill University and the Electronic Music Foundation, resulting in on online database of then current practice and opening up the discussion of a taxonomy for classification of new instruments to assist research in the field.
Dr Paine’s performance work acts as a platform for research into new interfaces for electronic music performance. He has performed at, ISEA2013, InSpace, Edinburgh, UC Davis, Luxembourg Choreographic Centre, Dance Massive, Melbourne in 2013, Ear to the Earth Festival, - John Cage Centennial Festival - NYC, (2012), SiteWorks, Bundanon (2010),Agora/Résonances Festival, Paris (2006), New York Electronic Arts Festival (2007), Liquid Architecture (2007), Aurora festival (2006, 2008), and The Australian New Music Network concert series (2008).
He has been the Australia Council for the Arts - New Media Arts Fellow, Composer in Residence - Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, Berlin, Founder, Curator and Director - Sonic Residues Festival - at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and been awarded a Green Room Award for Outstanding Creativity, for Escape Velocity (Company in Space).
His company Activated Space designed and implemented innovative interactive experiential exhibitions for the Melbourne Museum, the Jewish Museum of Australia, the Eureka Stockade Centre amongst others. See his thoughts on museum design.
He is a member of the editorial board for the Organised Sound Journal, Cambridge University Press, an advisor to the UNESCO funded Symposium on the Future and a founding member and advisory panel member of the Electronic Music Foundation, New York and Ear to the Earth. Dr Paine has been a Chief Investigator on several Australian Research Council grants and Australia Council for the Arts projects.
Garth’s recent research outcomes include a project with the Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy Foundation in Australia to develop a dynamic interactive music therapy tool that translates gesture in dynamic ways to allow clients of mixed ability to make music from activating what ever control of the body they have - here is an example
Music Therapy from Garth Paine on Vimeo.
I have also developed interactive music systems using the Audio Cubes for long stay adolescence in Hospital with the Westmead Children’s Hospital, Sydney, Australia. I can not show video of that project here for ethical reasons, but it was highly successful and is something I would like to continue developing in the USA.
You can read some of my papers on interactive music systems, New interfaces for musical performance, immersive environments and sound here