Colin Black

Exploring Acoustic Environments and Culture Through Sonic Art

Cited as a “key figure” in Prof. Seán Street’s book The Poetry of Radio: The Colour of Sound and awarded the Prix Italia for his work, Colin Black will discuss his use of field recordings of urban spaces in his work to explore ideas of place, as well as social and cultural contexts. Integral to Black’s practice is his use of field recordings as a part of his arts based research, from which Black has employed a range of methodologies that aim to enhance practitioner engagement with acoustic environments.  Using ambient recordings that detail the sonic textures of everyday life, Black creates works that encourage the listener to contemplate his arts based research findings, therefore gaining a deeper understanding of locations and the cultures that are shaped by them.

Colin Black is an composer/sound artist/radio artist who has gained international acclaim by winning the 2003 Prix Italia Award and achieving the final round selection in the 2010 and 2011 Prix Phonurgia Nova for his creative feature length radio works. As a result of this acclaim, Black has received multiple national and international commissions to create innovative long-form works for broadcast across major Australian and European networks. Black's curatorial credits include, international festival/showcases of award winning Australian acoustic art and radio art at London’s Resonance104.4fm, Vienna’s Kunstradio and Toronto’s New Adventures In Sound Art (NAISA). He is currently awaiting graduation for his PhD at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music where he was a recipient of the University of Sydney Postgraduate Awards Scholarship. More recently Black has taken up the position of casual academic lecturing at the University of Technology, Sydney and has to date authored a number of conference papers and journal articles including “An Overview of Spatialised Broadcasting Experiments With a Focus on Radio Art Practices” in Organised Sound. For more information see: www.colinblack.com.au

Links to Colin Black’s projects can be found at: 

Semblance http://www.kunstradio.at/2013A/10_03_13.html

Soundprints: Sealed in Sweden  http://colinblack.bandcamp.com/album/soundprints-sealed-in-sweden

Alien in the Landscape and Kilian’s Antipodean Dream  http://sonosphere.org/en/collection_en/artist_en/detail_en/items/15.html

Soundprints: The Prague Pressings  http://www.rozhlas.cz/radiocustica/projekt/_zprava/490227

The Ears Outside My Listening Room  http://www.abc.net.au/classic/content/2013/01/10/3666980.htm