BYRON DEAN

 

DOCTORAL RESEARCHER

Byron Dean is a sound artist and field recordist based in Narrm Melbourne. He creates sound works for diffusion, radio, performance, online and site-specific presentation. In his practice and research he is interested in reimagining and negotiating emplaced listening through field recording, exploring the themes of transformation and polyphony of perspective. Drawing relationships between sounds, environments and temporalities, his recent works have focused on the retracing of listening in urban environments in China and Australia through periodic revisitation.

His work has been presented in Australia, China, the Netherlands, Scotland, Austria and Japan and has been shown in festivals, contemporary art and performance spaces such as Bus Projects, Avantwhatever Festival, Lydgalleriet, Meridian Space, PROJECT SPACE, Bogong ELECTRIC Festival, Gallery OGU MAG, Kultur Drogerie, Australian Centre for The Moving Image, SuperDeluxe, Pantocrator Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, GW3 Gallery, West Space, BLINDSIDE and Kings Artist-Run.

 
 

 

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BYRON DEAN RESEARCH PROJECT

Sounding Transformation in Three Cities

Presently, cities within Australia and China are sites of urban transformation, where a multiplicity of shifts are taking place in complex ways. This practice-based project investigates how sound composition and field recording practice can respond to and sound encounters of transformation in the built environments of Suzhou, Kaifeng and Melbourne. Through cyclic fieldwork undertaken over a period of three and a half years between 2016 to 2019, an archive of field recordings was collected, which formed the basis of a number of iterative compositional responses, produced every year for each city. This body of work examines processes of returning, retracing and relistening in urban space, furthering discussions around transformation and accumulative listening in works of field recording.