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Emma Margetson <\/strong>(b.1993) is an acousmatic composer and sound artist based in the United Kingdom. Her output encompasses acousmatic composition, sound art, acousmatic performance interpretation and, occasionally, live electronic music improvisation. Her research interests include sound diffusion and spatialisation practices; site-specific works, sound walks and installations; audience development and engagement; and community music practice. Her music has been recognised and performed extensively in concerts and festivals internationally, and has been the recipient of a special mention in the Biennial Acousmatic Composition Competition M\u00e9tamorphoses (Belgium, 2020), the Excellence in Sound Art & Sound Design Prize in the klingt gut! Young Artist Award (Germany, 2018), and a First prize ex \u00e6quo in the Space of Sound Spatialization Performance Competition (Belgium, 2019). Emma Margetson is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Sound and Programme Leader of the MA Music and Sound Design course at the University of Greenwich (England, UK). She is also Co-Director of the Loudspeaker Orchestra Concert Series. Her work is available on several recording labels, including empreintes DIGITALes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n AI is the magic of the present. Daily we ask the computer our deepest questions and respond to its commands. Computer music algorithms with names like the \u201coracle\u201d are summoned by performers like shamans. 3-D loudspeakers, such as the IKO spherical loudspeaker array, can embody this more-than-human presence. Their viral geometric forms, reminiscent of an icosahedral bacteriophage, are at once familiar and sinister. Prestidigitation III is created specifically for this occasion as a new fixed-mediaversion of Prestidigitation for percussion and 3-D electronics. A central spherical loudspeaker array stands in place of the live percussionist, projecting his spatial performance virtually, while two more spherical loudspeaker arrays positioned on either side react with generative 3-D improvisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prestidigitation was written in 2022 in collaboration with percussionist Maxime Echardour, who gathered an array of objects and materials\u2014seashells, nutshells, bells, chimes, and other symbols of far-away environments\u2014to assemble them into a sculptural installation. In Echardour’s recorded performance, he examines each object, bringing it to life like a puppeteer, reanimating it like a magician. The sculpture is completed by a frame drum that brings together the entire assemblage into composite gestures of growing density. Both minute and explosive, the sounds are captured and projected to the listeners in 3-D, situating them in the midst of the micro-theater. The totemic loudspeakers at first amplify the performers\u2019 gestures, then gradually extend them into improvisations, blurring the boundary between the real and the virtual. From within the detailed score, the performer responds with brief improvisatory passages if his own, to which the loudspeakers multiply their unpredictable feedback. The ritual closes as the percussionist falls silent and the loudspeakers take over with a final improvisation, but the oracle\u2019s answers are inconclusive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aaron Einbond<\/strong>\u2019s work connects instrumental music, sound art, field recording, and interactive technology to explore connections between performer, listener, space, and place. Record label all that dust released his portrait album Cosmologies <\/em>performed by cellist S\u00e9verine Ballon, pianist Alvise Sinivia, and the Riot Ensemble conducted by Aaron Holloway-Nahum. His album Cities<\/em> features collaborations with ensemble Yarn\/Wire and Matilde Meireles, and his portrait album Without Words <\/em>was recorded by Ensemble Dal Niente. Other recent collaborators include EXAUDI, L\u2019Instant Donn\u00e9, United Instruments of Lucilin, Ensemble Recherche, soundinitiative, loadbang, Opera Lab Berlin, soloists Maxime Echardour, Samuel Stoll, and Marco Fusi; and festivals Pr\u00e9sences, Venice Biennale, rainy days, November Music, Transit, Nordic Music Days, and Festival d\u2019Aix-en-Provence. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Giga-Hertz F\u00f6rderpreis, and Artistic Research Residencies at IRCAM and ZKM. He teaches at City St George\u2019s, University of London, where he directs SPARC Lab for research in immersive sound and movement funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). He has taught at Columbia University, the University of Huddersfield, and Harvard University and studied at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, the University of California Berkeley, and IRCAM with teachers including Mario Davidovsky, Julian Anderson, Edmund Campion, and Philippe Leroux. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My piece explores subterranean London: the hidden chambers and channels, systems of tunnels and thoroughfares, wires, pipes, and rails. Abandoned tube stations, forgotten rivers, the Greenwich foot tunnel: where my grandfather used to sneak under the river to meet my grandmother, during a time when it was considered unseemly to date across the river.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My concept for this residency was to explore this underworld of connections. Using my own field recording practice around the city for sonic material, I experiment with the movement of sound. The rapid, whistle-resounding darkness of tube channels. The cavernous reflections of large tunnels. Highways of water. The emergence into unexpected meeting places, punctuated by footsteps and laughter, the spray of graffiti cans, broadcast music and voices rebounding off the walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amongst all this, I have grounded the piece in my own family history: a secret meeting place under the river. The piece ruminates on subterranean London not merely as a network of movement, but also of memory, connection, and finding, in amidst the noise, a place in which to meet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lara Weaver<\/strong> – I am a composer, sound artist, and Doctor of Music. In December 2025, I was awarded my PhD from the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen\u2019s University Belfast. My thesis investigated the unusual sounds of two contrasting environments: the bubbling of Northern Irish peatlands and the \u2018singing\u2019 sand dunes of the Empty Quarter desert (Rub\u2019 al-Khali, United Arab Emirates), by means of field recording and sound composition. Previously, I was at St John\u2019s College, Cambridge, where I read for my undergraduate degree in Music, achieving a First, and MPhil in Composition, which was awarded with Distinction. As a composer, my output includes orchestral, choral, chamber music and song, electroacoustic music (often using my own field recordings), immersive audio and ambisonic works (including expertise working with the SARC Sonic Lab), and multi-channel gallery installations. I am currently working on a commission with the London Symphony Orchestra (resident at the Barbican) as a Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composer (2026-2027). Other recent projects include works composed for the Crash Ensemble as a Crash Works Creator 2023-2025 (\u2018Singing Sands\u2019, premiered at New Music Dublin 2025); and Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble (\u2018Soft Ground\u2019, exploring the sounds of Irish boglands, premiered at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2024). I compose music for a wide variety of artists and ensembles, my music has received multiple broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, and my work has recently been released on Crash Records as part of their Crash Works II album.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n This piece investigates IKO-specific non-linear perceptual phenomena emerging from the interaction of beamformed projection and simple recursive spatial formulas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Gianni Bencich-Grigore<\/strong> is a composer, performer, and researcher based in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His work explores the intersections of microsound, critical theory, and mysticism. His creative practice examines how sound can become a space for discovering the new, disrupting the apparent, and encountering the unknown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gianni is currently associated with the Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST) and the University of Birmingham\u2019s Centre for Electronic Music, where he is developing work around AI synthesis, spatialised listening, and the aesthetics of the Real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His music has been presented in festivals and venues across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including major international festivals like Donaueschinger Musiktage (Germany), Festival Cervantino (Mexico), and BEAST FEaST (UK).<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bassial Pressure<\/em> transforms architectural space into a living, resonant instrument. Drawing on spatial audio and sound system culture, the work places deep bass at the centre – not as background, but as a force that shapes structure, space, and sensation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Low-frequency vibrations move through the materials of the building and the bodies within it, forming a dynamic field that audiences do not simply hear but physically inhabit. Within this environment, higher-frequency sounds are projected and set in motion, tracing shifting trajectories through the air. The result is an evolving interplay between grounded weight and spatial movement: bass anchors the space, while other sounds circulate and transform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Informed by dub and diasporic bass cultures, the work invites a fully embodied mode of listening – one that emphasises noise, vibration, immersion, and collective experience over fixed sonic images or precise localisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, sound operates as both an architectural and social force, reshaping how space is perceived and shared. The audience is not positioned in front of the work, but within it: immersed in a field of pressure, resonance, and moving sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr Amit Dinesh Patel, aka Dushume<\/strong>, is an experimental noise and sound artist, influenced by Asian underground music and DJ culture. His work focuses on performing and improvising with purpose built do-it-yourself instruments, and recording these instruments incorporating looping, re-mixing and re-editing techniques. Lack and loss of control are central to his work. He has a PhD in Music, \u201cStudio Bench: the DIY nomad and Noise Selector\u201d (2019), from the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Sound and an active member of the Sound\/Image Research Centre at the University of Greenwich, London<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n A co-authored exploration of the lives of sex workers in New York City. Originally composed in 2019, the piece foregrounds the nuanced realities behind this work, the deeply human aspects of the work, as well as the meaning and solidarity it can create. In widening perspectives, it attends to the complex network of human relationships at the centre of what is often ‘othered’ in an attempt to distance us from sex labourers, their clients, and the physical, psychological and emotional labour of the work. In distancing them, we invoke societal defence mechanisms founded on shame, and a disowning of our interconnectedness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr. Angela McArthur<\/strong> is an artist, academic and interdisciplinary advocate. She leads a Master’s programme in spatial sound in the department of Anthropology at University College London. She has undertaken many artist residencies and interdisciplinary collaborations, including a five month residency working with the IKO loudspeaker at the Institut f\u00fcr Elektronische Musik (IEM) in Graz. She initiated the first UK tour of IKO works in 2019. Her work centres around the practice and theorisation of aesthetics in sound, underrepresented (including other-than-human) onto-epistemologies, and ocean environments. She champions diversity in access and representation. She’s worked in studio, live and location environments and founded Soundstack, an annual series of workshops, masterclasses and concerts about spatial sound aesthetics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n A spatial sound work that immerses audiences in the shifting cognitive landscape of ADHD, tracing a journey from winter burnout to the intense, fast-moving energy of a \u201cspring brain\u201d through layered, overlapping sound in motion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Using spherical loudspeaker arrays, the piece spatialises thought as orbiting, colliding, and dissolving streams, creating an embodied listening experience that offers insight into neurodivergent perception and attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Kat Pegler<\/strong> is an interdisciplinary artist and artistic researcher working across immersive sound, participatory practice, and ecological methodologies. Her work explores flow-state and music as a method for environmental connection, creating sensory and collective experiences that investigate relationships between people, place, and more-than-human systems. She develops spatial sound compositions, installations, and community-led projects that bridge artistic practice and environmental research. Kat has been Lead Artist on the Horizon EU VOICE project and is Co-Founder of Kerbside Collective, a sustainability-led research studio working across heritage, public space, and climate engagement. Her recent work includes immersive sonic projects on climate futures (Brunel University), and spatial audio for XR and exhibitions. She has received Arts Council England funding to develop her spatial sound practice and has contributed to international collaborations across art, science, and technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n with performers Maria Sappho & Pablo Galaz<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Three performers will play Truncated Tetrahedron digital musical instruments, each controlling sound generation and diffusion across a corresponding IKO loudspeaker. The Truncated Tetrahedron DMI is similar to the IKO loudspeaker in its design as it contains four joysticks arranged equally around its four hexagonal faces. This even distribution requires that performers grasp and move the controller in a manner unlike an ergonomically designed device. The joysticks are mapped to chaotic noise generators, glitched synthesizers, heavily filtered field recordings and sound spatialization, which when combined with the joystick layout requires performers to attentively listen and fine-tune their grasp and movements. The resulting performance is an intricate navigation of body position, microgesture, and an evolving electronic sound world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr Colin Frank<\/strong> is a percussionist, composer, and sound artist whose work explores found objects, environmental noise and immersive technology. His texturally rich percussion playing and noise compositions have been heard at numerous international festivals including the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, CTM Berlin, Beast Feast, and Percussive Arts Society Day of Percussion. He has been commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, TAK, and AndPlay. His audience-interactive sound installations have been exhibited at New Adventures in Sound Art, Le Vivier festival, Analix Forever and Salem Art Works. He holds a PhD from the University of Huddersfield, teaches percussion and composition at Leeds Conservatoire, and is winner of the Hildegard Westerkamp Award for sound composition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Triadic Flow<\/em>\u00a0explores the dynamic relationships between three interconnected sonic bodies through layers of field recordings, diffuse textures, and shifting spatial resonances. Emerging and dissolving in a continuous exchange of energy, the work moves between environmental traces and abstracted sound masses, allowing fragments of place, atmosphere, and motion to blur into one another. Drawing on the triad as both structural and symbolic form, the piece navigates unstable balances between density and openness, proximity and distance, stillness and drift, as individual sonic identities gradually merge into a fluid, permeable whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPrestidigitation III<\/em> \u2014 Aaron Einbond<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\nA place to meet<\/em> \u2014 Lara Weaver<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Wheels within Wheels<\/em> \u2014 Gianni Bencich-Grigore<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
All materials in this piece were synthesised with the sapf (Sound as Pure Form) audio programming language.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBassial Pressure<\/em> \u2014 Dushume<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Labourer Others<\/em> \u2014 Angela McArthur<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Spring Brain<\/em> \u2014 Kat Pegler<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Truncated-Tetra-Icosahedron Meta-Instrument<\/em> \u2014 Colin Frank <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
For Sonic Spheres, the controller\u2019s current multichannel diffusion system (used on octophonic, quadrophonic and stereo setups) will be remapped to the icosahedron\u2019s 20-channel diffusion. Due to the similarity in shape between an IKO speaker and the DMI, mapping will correlate between the DMI and the IKO speaker. This will allow each performer to experience a direct relationship between their handheld device and the speaker\u2019s sound diffusion. Gestures performed with the joysticks will correlate to movement of sound across the IKO speaker\u2019s surface, in addition to the sound synthesis\/manipulation based on three independently running versions of the core Truncated Tetrahedron improvisation environment.
The performers will move throughout the space using Bluetooth versions of the DMI, allowing them to reorientate themselves to their IKO speakers and finetune their movements to the speaker\u2019s diffusion. This will also provide audience members with close-up perspectives of the fine motor movements required when playing the controllers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n