Briony Luttrell

This research explores the barriers to entry and the challenges and frustrations for Australian First Nations music producers. The proliferation of software-based technology in the recording studio sector resulted in notions of technological democracy. However, this democratization is often contested for not including women and various marginalized and minority groups. Through an Indigenous-led music production workshop project, the research team conducted daily yarning sessions at the conclusion of each day. The findings found many challenges and frustrations for the participants and mentors in the program as they attempted to participate in the recording sector including access to suitable housing and infrastructure, agency and cultural safety in recording studios, ongoing discrimination in the music industry, and lateral violence and jealousy around perceived success. This project seeks to understand these barriers and look toward approaches to improve education, diversity, equity, inclusion and participation for First Nations music producers.

In this chapter, we argue that music recording involves three domains of knowledge that have been previously siloed: musicianship, music production, and audio engineering. Each of these domains fundamentally engages in a shared action: critical listening. However, in the case of audio engineering, critical listening, as both an industrial term and as an act, is often and problematically treated as more of a scientific endeavour akin to notions of audiology and "good hearing". While some authors argue audio engineering is a creative process, there is yet to be appropriate theorisation that positions audio engineering as part of an overarching musical act. In this paper, we explore the Music Recording Nexus as a means to include audio engineering as part of a larger field of practice: music recording. In doing so, we seek to reframe the term "critical listening" and provide new definitions for playing, producing, and engineering music with the goal of de-siloing their associated domains of knowledge into a central and more industrially relevant theorisation. To make this case, we examine Technical Ear Training as an approach to skill development in audio engineering that has not been contextualised in their real-world application and continues to be neglected from inclusion in music recording as an outcome focused act.

Our Flag Means Death (2022) is a television series set in the Golden Age of Piracy, premiering in March 2022 to critical acclaim and unprecedented audience engagement. It can be argued that this show is a deliberate romantic queer reading of historical facts. In this article we reflect on the social function of storytelling and audience labour within the historical and cultural contexts of fictional queer screen representations. We theorise queer reading as a practice of learning to recognize, identify and create patterns of semiotic resources, Intertextual Thematic Formations (Lemke 1995a, 1995b). This practice is a reaction to a history of being erased or relegated to subtext in fictional media, exacerbated by broader cultural and political contexts that criminalise, censor, and de-humanize LGBTQIA+ bodies and lives. We also make the case for queer reading being a particular form of audience labour, in that readers are asked to ‘do extra work’ to see queer bodies and communities in texts. This is especially important in cases where identities and communities are regularly symbolically annihilated, and those individuals are repeatedly required to perform that extra labour to “see themselves”. The popularity of Our Flag Means Death made it clear that this show resonated with both members of the LGBTQIA+ community and wider audiences. Season One is a unique case study where we explore how character, narrative, queerbaiting and coding are used to achieve a low/easy labour environment for a vulnerable viewer and how this is an act of care and empathy.   

This paper examines Western music education through Kenneth Burke's dramatism, revealing how traditional pedagogical practices function as symbolic actions perpetuating cultural hierarchies and conservative ideologies. We argue that institutionalised music education employs rhetorical mechanisms conflating scientistic and dramatistic approaches to music, particularly through repertoire selection and error correction. These mechanisms position certain works as inherently “correct” while othering alternatives, maintaining cultural supremacy that privileges Western Common Practice traditions and potentially limiting students’ creative development and contemporary career opportunities. We demonstrate how institutions tacitly deploy these mechanisms, creating self-perpetuating musical conservatism that disconnects students from industrial practices and innovation. In response, we propose the Shared Music Vocabulary (SMV) as an alternative framework acknowledging music education as rhetorical symbolic action entangled with social, political, and cultural identities. This approach prioritises intellectual property generation and embraces multiple disciplines simultaneously, offering more inclusive and industrially relevant music education.

In this article we reflect on our experiences as practitioners and educators leading an annual devising collaboration between Music and Theatre at the University of the Sunshine Coast, that results in a new one-hour long production. We discuss the complexities of devising, in particular how do we navigate the balance of wellbeing with encouraging students to work outside of their comfort zones in a devised theatre process full of uncertainty? In response to pedagogy and devising scholarship, and themes that emerged from our four case studies we propose a new approach, the Creative Collaboration SeeSaw. Our aim in writing this article is to articulate our experiences of being director, musical director, and teachers as we navigate with our cohorts the tensions between care, comfort, discomfort, learning and safety in a collaborative devising process full of doubt and the unknown.

The Chair and the Cello premiered internationally as the opening special event at the ADSA 2025 Conference in Studio 77 at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.

This is the premiere of a new performance work. Set over the course of one night, this performance explores ideas of loneliness, isolation and academia. The human need for connection is confronted by the inanimate object: sexy cellos, fascist chairs, and piles of doom. When we are overwhelmed with to-do lists and easy-clean DIY dystopian capitalism, when we are confined in a liminal and uncanny space, what is it that we need to survive? Devised by Hannah Banks, Nicola Hyland and Briony Luttrell with Carl Walling and Lucy Orkild. Performed by Hannah Banks, Briony Luttrell and Lucy Orkild. Directed by Nicola Hyland with Musical Direction / Composition / Sound Design by Briony Luttrell and Lighting Design by Carl Walling. Projection Design by Rebekah De Roo with

Technical Support by Lucas Neal.

"The Chair and The Cello: Developing industry guidelines for practicing creative safety" is a research project to develop an innovative best-practice industrial framework of practitioner wellbeing within the Creative Industries. This research is autoethnographic as the researchers investigated creative safety in the devising and rehearsal process by developing a new live performance. From this we will develop a trauma informed guide/toolkit for industry practitioners who want to engage in creative practice that uses difficult autobiographical

stories.

Presented by Hannah Banks and Briony Luttrell in the panel session Sharing, Spiralling, Slowing

and Showing (Chair: Sarah Courtis).

Using creativity as a therapeutic act is common in theatre and performance as performers may

sacrifice their wellbeing in a Sisyphean pursuit of romanticised suffering and the endless search

for ‘authentic’ and meaningful creative expression. Current scholarship around mental health

and wellbeing in creative industries and tertiary education indicates a need for novel

interventions in how we make and teach making (Daniel 2022; Gross & Musgrave 2020; Orygen

2017). As practitioners and educators, we propose that creating from places of unresolved

difficulties or mining our own trauma for performance is problematic and we highlight the

importance of care, personal creative safety, and emotionally and ethically sustainable creative

practice.

This paper explores the development of a new performance work, The Chair and The Cello.

Since 2023 we have been researching practitioner well-being, or what we have termed creative

safety. Creative safety is our innovative approach to the process of developing creative works

that promotes equity, wellbeing, and career sustainability for practitioners. The Chair and The

Cello explored creative safety in the devising process by developing a new performance

directed by Hyland, performed by Banks and Luttrell with production management and design

from Walling. Starting with provocations involving stories of personal difficulty, we investigated

the application of Baim’s model of The Drama Spiral, a decision-making tool to help

practitioners navigate the use of personal stories, and Flemmer et al’s Empathetic Partnership

framework, to test innovative methods of collaborative creative safety. This paper will

accompany the premiere performance of The Chair and The Cello at ADSA 2025.

The proliferation of software-based technology in the recording studio sector resulted in notions of technological democracy. However, this position is contested as it does not consider the representation of women and various minority groups that are often excluded. This research explores the barriers to entry and the challenges and frustrations for Australian First Nations music producers. Through an indigenous-led music production workshop project, the research team conducted daily yarning sessions at the conclusion of each day. The findings found many challenges and frustrations for the participants and mentors in the program as they attempted to participate in the recording sector including access to suitable housing and infrastructure, cultural safety in recording studios, ongoing discrimination in the music industry, and lateral violence and jealousy around perceived success. This project seeks to understand these barriers and look toward approaches to improve education, diversity, equity, inclusion and participation for First Nations music producers.