Karen Power is an Irish composer who uses environmental sounds and acoustic instruments in her intriguing work. She is a master field recordist who has recorded sounds in some of the worlds most isolated and challenging locations including The Arctic, Amazon, Namib Desert, Outback Australia, and Antarctica. She has shared clips of her work including The Bats of Namibia, Frogs of Angor Wat, fascinating bog sounds and arctic ice sounds in collaborations with the Quiet Music Ensemble and many brilliant collaboraters on her project human nature.  She’s also shared with us a raw field recording from her recent trip to record a double cicada brood emergence. She certainly helped deepen my awareness to soundscapes that brought me back to my first encounter with this idea when I took a course on Soundscapes from R. Murray Shafer. Karen and I also talked about her projects working to explore listeneing, composing and improvising with young children and other related projects to provide inclusive music making with people living with disabiliities. 

 Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on your favourite platform, and I’ve also linked the transcript.

Anthony Brandt is an acclaimed composer who is also a multi-disciplinary researcher. Dr. Brandt is  a Professor at Rice University and co-founder and Artistic Director of Musiqa. Like many people worldwide, I had first learned of his work as co-author with neuroscientist David Eagleman,  of the amazing book “The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World”. We started this episode with an overview of that book, and Tony’s passion for the importance of encouraging creativity at all stages of life comes through in our discussion of his research, compositions, teaching and mentoring. You’ll hear about how he and other researchers are using mobile brain body imaging, and how research into the arts are so important to the development of neuroscience. You’ll learn about his unique childhood, his mentors and approach to composing and teaching composition, his valuable insights on presenting new music and how integrating art forms can help to connect with audiences. We’re also shining a light on his recent album of string quartet music Meeting of Minds and LiveWire, which are both collaborations with the NobleMotion Dance Company and the University of Houston Brain Center.  Central to this episode is the importance of creativity, and different ways to investigate and explore that.