Garth Paine

Garth Paine is a composer, scholar and acoustic ecologist. He crosses art-science boundaries with his community embedded work on environmental listening and creative place-making in addition to his environmental musical works and performances. His research drives toward new approaches to acoustic ecology and the exploration of sound as our lived context including the application of VR in health.

In 2018 he was researcher/artist in residence in Europe at IRCAM (Centre Pompideau) and Center for Arts and Media (ZKM).

His passion for sound as an exhibitable object has given rise to interactive environments where the sonic landscape is generated through gesture, presence and behavior and several music scores for dance works using realtime video tracking and bio-sensing and musical compositions that have been performed in Australia, Europe, Japan, USA, South America, Hong Kong and New Zealand and, in 2014, Korea, Macedonia, France, and UK.

Paine's current research centers around the Listen(n) Project, on acoustic ecology project that focuses on field recording and community building. He co-directs the Acoustic Ecology Lab (AELab@ASU) with Professor Sabine Feisst, which he established in 2016.

He has a long history of composing musical works from his field recordings and engaging in environmental work through sound. Recent examples include the Site Works project at Bundanon, Australia for which he composed the work Presence in the Landscape and his work Becoming Desert for the Listen(n) Symposium concert in 2014.

Paine is internationally regarded as an innovator in the field of interactivity in experimental music and media arts. He is an active contributor to the International NIME conference where he was keynote speaker in 2016. He is on the editorial board of Organised Sound Journal, which he has also guest-edited on several occasions. He 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 current practice and opening up the discussion of a taxonomy for classification of new instruments to assist research in the field.

He is a professor in interactive sound and digital media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and professor of composition in the School of Music at Arizona State University. From 2012-13, he was interim-director of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and then associate director in 2013-14. From 2011-2104, he was undergraduate chair for the Digital Culture program. He is affiliate faculty at the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes and a senior sustainability scientist with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at ASU.