Dr. Nigel Helyer (a.k.a. Dr Sonique) is an Australian-based Sculptor and Sound Artist with an international reputation for his large-scale sonic installations, environmental sound sculpture works and new media projects. He maintains a strong interest in collaborative research projects and is currently an honorary associate in Architectural Acoustics at the University of Sydney, an industry research partner at the University of New South Wales in the area of Virtual Audio Reality and a collaborating artist with the SymbioticA lab at the University of Western Australia. Nigel is a co-founder and commissioner of the “SoundCulture” organisation; a fellow of the Australia Council for 2002/3 and the curator of “Sonic-Differences” as part of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth 2004. Nigel has been the recipient of various awards and fellowships, and has undertaken many international Artist Residencies.
Nigel Helyer has a unique role in the development of Sound Art, both within Australia and at an International level. During the course of the past twenty years his contribution in the areas of practice, critical debate and advocacy have had a strong influence on the practice of Sound Art, helping it to emerge from a position of relative obscurantism to become a vital and internationally recognised form of cultural expression. Nigel played a major role in the development of the “Synapse” Art and Science partnership scheme that has introduced joint funding by the Australia Council and the ARC.
Dr. Daniel Woo is responsible for Human Computer Interaction teaching and research in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales. Current projects are focussed around the development of user interfaces both in terms of engineering and usability. Audio Nomad is a key research area for his group.
His research and commercial background is strongly associated with speech and audio technologies and mobile computing, having worked on projects in the areas of speech recognition, speech synthesis, telephone applications and handheld software.
Chris Rizos commenced research on precise satellite-based positioning techniques at the University of New South Wales in 1983. His graduate studies were in Satellite Geodesy, and although his research has broadened to encompass Navigation technologies and applications, he remains active within the international and local geodetic community. Over the last ten years Chris Rizos has built up a strong research team known as the Satellite Navigation and Positioning group (SNAP), arguably the premier academic Global Positioning System (GPS) R&D group in Australia, and certainly the most prolific. The SNAP group focusses its research in the area of high precision (carrier phase-based) Global Navigation Satellite System GNSS) positioning technology and applications. Prof Rizos will be primarily responsible for developing and adapting the GPS-based location/tracking technology as well as the spatial database server design.
Chris Rizos was made a Fellow of the International Association of Geodesy (IAG) in 1999. He was elected president of the IAG's Commission 4, Positioning & Applications, for the period 2003-2007, as well as being currently the chairman (2003-2005) of the Advisory Board on the Law of the Sea (ABLOS), being one of the three IAG representatives (there are also representatives from the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and the International Hydrographic Organisation). Prof Rizos became a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Navigation in 1999. In 1999 & 2003, he was a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and in 1999 a Senior Fellow of the Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He is currently manager of Program 1, Integrated Positioning & Mapping Systems, of the newly established CRC for Spatial Information (commencing 2004).
Nick is a PhD student researching spatial audio synthesis and perception in the augmented reality setting, supervised by Daniel Woo and Chris Rizos. He also developed the software used in Audio Nomad artworks to render the multichannel and binaural 3d sound. Prior to resuming study, from 1998 to 2003 he worked at spatial audio company Lake Technology, most recently as product manager for the Huron spatial audio workstation, and earlier, as a DSP and systems engineer.
Nick also produces experimental sound work, including radio works for "Sunday Night At The Movies", on FBi, Sydney's largest community radio station. His production techniques often combine voice and field recordings with complex and unusual sound manipulation processes such as granular synthesis, ambisonics, flocking/swarming and mass/spring/damper physical modeling. He recently built an ambisonic microphone to record 3d sound fields, and has also built and uses binaural microphone sets. Other sound works include "Touristx2", a multichannel composition by Metasense (collaboration), played at the 2006 Australasian Computer Music Conference (ACMC), and "Yellow Mondays", a generative multichannel work that implemented a "swarming, spatialised granular synthesis" at LocAlgSon 2003 at Barcelona's Centre de Cultura Contemporània. Nick presented on a panel about science/art collaborations at ISEA 2004 and has presented on panels, workshops and masterclasses at Electrofringe electronic arts festival in Newcastle, Australia every year since 2002.
© 2005-6.