BIOGRAPHY

Ros Bandt is an internationally acclaimed sound artist, composer, researcher and scholar. Since 1977 she has pioneered interactive sound installations, sound sculptures, and created sound playgrounds, spatial music systems, and some 40 sound installations worldwide. She has curated many sound performances, exhibitions and events. Her original works are recorded on New Albion Records (USA), Move Records (Melbourne), EMI/ABC, and Wergo (Germany).

In 1990 Bandt won the Don Banks Composers Award, being the first woman to do so. Other awards include the inaugural Benjamin Cohen Peace Prize in the USA and the Sound Art Australia Prize funded by the ABC and the Goethe Institute.

She has been commissioned by the Paris Autumn festival, the Studio of Acoustic Art, WDR-Cologne, Transit and ORF Vienna and was one of the six exquisites in the International Sound Art Festival in the USA. She collaborates with many interdisciplinary artists and has been a founding member of three ensembles: La Romanesca early music ensemble, the cross-cultural Back to Back Zithers, and the improvisatory LIME.

Bandt is a prolific writer on sound and her book, Sound Sculpture: Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks, (Fine Arts Press) is the first audio visual profile of Australian sound art. She is an honorary senior research fellow at the Australian Centre, the University of Melbourne, where she directs The Australian Sound Design Project, the first on-line soundart gallery, searchable data-base and web site merging soundart practice with academic research. She teaches sound art studios at the VCA and RMIT and is in demand as a keynote speaker on sound, here and internationally.

Composer website:  www.rosbandt.com

FEATURED WORKS

Rapturous, for tarhu, air slide whistle, ancient bronze cymbals, recorder head joints, field recordings from Arizona from the Listen N biosphere reserve database, recorded by Leah Barclay.
A remix from a longer 8 channel work Raptor commissioned for the Listen N festival, USA.

Rapturous is a fast ride with the Golden eagle  Acquilla  Chrysaetos  making its way from Joshua Tree Biosphere reserve to Beaver Creek, Arizona, USA where it was recorded.  The granulated eagle calls are stretched to represent the psycho-perceptual orientation of the eagle, solitary, looking down over the land. The tarhu is the eagle’s eye, a moving point through which we experience its strength, subtlety and economy in controlling the aerodynamic ride.  Listen with headphones. The eagle is a long way up.

Featured in Sonic Environment Waves July 2016