About

Ben Byrne is a listener. He creates and inhabits situations for listening that foster experimental, ethical, and sustainable ways of being in response to technological pressure, climate crisis, and hegemonic power. This involves ongoing listening, making sonic works, commissioning and organizing sonic programs, teaching, writing sonic theory, building community connection and engagement, and working to preserve and archive sonic practice.

Program Manager and Senior Lecturer, Bachelor of Design (Digital Media) at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Director of Avantwhatever

Past curatorial projects include the Melbourne Design Week 2023 Avantwhatever Commissions Launch and Listening Party, Melbourne Music Week’s ‘MESS Through the Roof’, RMIT Digital Media’s Extremely Online in 2021, Avantwhatever Festival 2016-2020, the wrong biennale 2019-2020, ABC Radio National program Soundproof’s Live Proof in 2015, Seven Thousand Oaks Festival of Art and Sustainability’s ‘Touch at a Distance’ at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2010, University of Technology Sydney Music.Sound.Design Symposium 2008, Electrofringe Festival of Electronic Arts 2006 & 2007, and Liquid Architecture Festival of Sound Arts Sydney 2005-2007

Recently published writing includes Listening Online, Diverse Attentions, and Avantwhatever.org, Embodied audiovisual experience: The role of sound in contemporary screen and digital media (2022) co-authored with Darrin Verhagen for the book Materialising Digital Futures and Directing Listening: Sound Design Methods from Film to Site-Responsive Sonic Art (2021) published in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies

New audio work ‘Soda’ (2023) published on SNOsound