Briony Luttrell

Research Background
The environmental impact of creative work is an increasing concern in the carbon footprint of production and digital distribution (Brennan et al 2020, Marks 2020). Whilst creative reuse and bricolage are strategies used commonly to reduce the financial cost of creative work, they are now gaining momentum as environmental cost interventions (Hayward 2024). Surreal audiovisual comedy is a notable site of innovation in the bricolage and reuse of materials, notably in the works of Monty Python, Quentin Smirhes and Noel Fielding. This project explores the question: how can a comedic approach to creative reuse and bricolage help to reduce the environmental impact of audiovisual creative work?

Research Contribution
[SILENT] FILMS is a 7min collection of sketch comedy style videos that use captions to communicate “audio” elements of dialogue, voice-over, music and sound effects. The lack of audio encourages audiences to create the soundtrack for themselves via the creative reuse and bricolage of sounds in their own personal and cultural intertextual memory. It builds on industrial knowledge and scholarship of the creativity and techniques of captioning, prevalent in discourses around accessibility (Berry 2024, Zdenek 2015). The environmental impact of creating and distributing this video-only work is minimised in lower electricity needs and smaller data streaming rates.

Research Significance
Premiering on 25 July 2024 at Light Industry’s Arts and Manufacturing Showcase in Kunda Park, the work is part of a QLD Arts Council commission connecting manufacturing with creative industries which is now the focus of a national consortium of stakeholders and associated funding schemes. Over 300 hundred people were in attendance including local and state government representatives and delegates from Creative Australia. The work informs the development of HallowGreen 2025, a Halloween-based circular economy and creative reuse event celebrating the region’s light industrial sector.

Research Background
Critiqued as a cornerstone of Neo-Liberal consumerism (Cavusoglu & Dakhli 2016), the fashion industry has long established the sonic and musical accompaniment as central to the commercial outcomes of a runway event (Skov et al. 2009). This ephemeral nature of the musical component of fashion shows is often credited with deeper audience engagement and consequently loans a level of value perception to the physical artefacts displayed on the catwalk (Strähle & Kriegel 2018), and by association the brand proposition at market. This is particularly the case when the music accompanying the show is bespoke in nature and ‘high art’ in stylistic choice.

Research Contribution
Visual art, often housed and traded in galleries, is often positioned as non-ephemeral propositions that are fundamentally materialist in nature (Harman 2016). As a result, their value is perceived through material perspectives (Chen 2009). SOUNDPLAYSTILL challenges this idea by providing a bespoke musical and sound art-based commission to accompany a visual art exhibition recontextualised as a runway event. In doing so, the work explores the rhetorical power of bespoke sonic creative labour (Hofman 2015) in persuading market perception of value in visual art cultural events.

Research Significance
SOUNDPLAYSTILL is a one hour recorded soundtrack work, comprising of two 30-minute movements. It was commissioned for STILL a sellout immersive one night only artistic experience showcasing 72 new artworks of Australian artist John Wren. The event was held on 23 May 2024 at Superordinary in Brisbane, QLD. A short-form documentary was made about the exhibition directed by Hayden Rossiter featuring excerpts of SOUNDPLAYSTILL and new music by Briony Luttrell. The success of the STILL exhibition for John Wren has led to significant art sales, multiple collaborations with businesses featuring his artwork, being a finalist in the Henry Jones Art Prize 2024, and a new feature with lifestyle concept store BECKER MINTY.

Research Background
String arranging has long been the almost exclusive remit of Western art music practices when deployed in popular song, from The Beatles to Kanye. The theory, tools and methods of string arranging are situated in written traditions which are Common Practice Era technique-based, educationally gatekept, and not tailored to recorded popular music contexts (Luttrell 2017). The result of this is an industry barrier to diverse practitioners who are trained in aural and popular contexts or have limited CPE training, and the lack of a methodology that situates popular music string arranging practice in the culture industries.

Research Contribution
This portfolio consists of 5 string arrangements for recorded popular music that demonstrate the application of a new style-based methodology for writing arrangements for industry (Luttrell 2017). The styles are framed by Lemke’s metafunctions (1989, 1995, 1998) and describe intertextual patterns of technical and cultural features of strings, using instance^institution rhetorical formations (Burke 1950, 1969) to persuade a listener of an intertextual relationship between new work and existing canon. The portfolio features Broadcast, Western Classical and World styles.

Research Significance
To date, the successful deployment of the methodology in these works resulted in commercial releases with over 10,000 streams; 2 songs placed in a feature film which screened at national and international film festivals; 2 songs that are part of a documentary in development; and dozens of subsequent national and international commissions. It also underpins the articles ‘A rhetoric of style’ (Graham & Luttrell 2019) published in Q1 journal Social Semiotics, and ‘Multimodal Narrative Songwriting’ (Ward & Luttrell in press). This approach to praxis is foundational to USC’s new Bachelor of Music and is a significant step towards changing the discourse around musical creative practice to be more diverse and industry embedded.