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.

While the majority of Retirement Living (RL) residents have not yet accessed the government’s home-based care and support infrastructure, there is a growing expectation that many will require Support at Home (SAH) services in the near future. Given more than 317,000 older Australians will be living in RL communities by 2030 [3], the RL industry will have a critical role in supporting the health needs of older adults, ensuring the viability and sustainability of the aged care sector, however little is known about what this should look like in best-practice. This report aims to provide major industry operators, all tiers of government, and industrial peak bodies with meaningful data and recommendations on the future of the Australian Retirement Living Industry to ensure our nation is a world leader in the provision of housing, lifestyle, and health and wellbeing for older people. 

Songs, pervasive sonic ephemeral acts that combine words and music, live in a contemporary world of commercialization as commodity. Flowing through our everyday lives as a given and oft-underacknowledged artifact to accompany our shopping, car trips, date nights, and gym days. Yet songs have a history as long as humanity and language. They hold a place, up until recently in our evolution, as an oral history library of the human species. Why then is there limited scholarship about how songs tell stories, and the ways in which those stories come together with sounds? And why is there a disconnect between songwriting as industrial practice and academic thought? This book argues that all songwriting choices are storytelling choices and asks the question: how can we think about Song as one of the most memorable, potent, multimodal, and portable storytelling devices ever devised. In doing so, the authors make the case for rethinking the analysis of songs and practice of songwriting with an emphasis on listening. This is a book for songwriters, scholars, and song lovers alike. Ultimately, the authors challenge contemporary thinking on music and song itself, and argue for a new theorisation of song as a multimodal storytelling sonic act. 

Book chapter in Gothic in the Oceanic South Maritime, Marine and Aquatic Uncanny in Southern Waters Edited By Allison Craven, Diana Sandars

Acidification is a performance for cello and underwater soundscapes created for “Returning to the Gothic Ocean” symposium in 2021. The work explores the past, present, and possible futures of the Great Barrier Reef and is the first collaboration between interdisciplinary sound scholars Leah Barclay and Briony Luttrell. The work draws on ecoacoustic hydrophone (underwater) recordings submerging listeners in the sonic environment of the diverse and fragile marine ecosystems surrounding the Reef. The recordings document death and ecotoxicity and form part of a large-scale interdisciplinary research project designed to explore sound as a measure for health and call to action in ecological crisis. The soundscape explores acidification, extinction, and the urgent need for interdisciplinary action and is the first in a trilogy of works exploring different approaches to presenting ecological sound art for diverse audiences. This chapter introduces the reader to this piece and provides a brief exegesis that explains the Gothic influences on this project.

In this paper, we explore the synthesis of two PhD projects that address a gap in knowledge between industry songwriting practice and theorisations of songwriting. These projects explore patterns in modern songwriting through the contrasting lenses of cultural semantics and narratology. Both project methodologies involve large-scale corpus analysis and creative practice as proof of concept tested in industry. In synthesising these ideas, we present a multimodal narrative approach to songwriting that uses the concept of shared musical vocabularies to unify and extend existing models of praxis. We frame our argument with the assertion that songwriting is storytelling, storytelling is meaning making, and thus models for understanding and developing songwriting practice explore song narratives by recognising every component of song as semiotic resource. We demonstrate the efficacy of Multimodal Narrative Songwriting by applying it to the creation and analysis of a major label song release.