Jay Needham Bio

Jay Needham is a sound artist, electro-acoustic composer and scholar. His sound art, works for radio and visual art have appeared at museums, festivals and on the airwaves worldwide. Through applied aspects of his research, Needham strives to affect positive change and bridge the gap between the arts and the sciences.

His new work Chronography; animal premiered at The Global Composition in Darmstadt Germany in partnership with the 46th. Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in July 2012. The work examines the role of recorded sound as it relates to exploration with a specific focus on Antarctica.

Robert Falcon Scott took two gramophones to Antarctica on his 1910 expedition, on loan from Victor along with 100 or so records. His capable photographer Herbert Ponting created the image that depicts one of the expedition’s husky dogs standing next to the gramophone as if listening. The image, staged as a bit of comic relief on the ice, is a riff on His Master’s Voice, as well as a historic artifact from a classic era of exploration. This image is a telling expression of how music served as an aid for the maintenance of a specific kind of mission time. This project is an extension of his primary involvement with the initiative Antartica:Imagined Geographies on the SIUC campus.

Needham has been re-purposing antique gramophone horns for sculptural sound installations and also as amplified instruments, percussive bells that resonate, clang and chime. The work is intended as an audible exploration, a pseudo –scientific demonstration where the sounds of ship propellers, penguin colonies and ice fractures gather to express an epistemology of field recordings and the role that sound technologies played in exploration and musical performance. Chronography: animal is conceived of as a bridge to connect practices of improvised music and sound art that evoke a sense of place.

His work has appeared at critically acclaimed festivals such as Resonant Cities, New Media Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland; Deep Wireless II, New Adventures in Sound Art, Toronto, Canada; Ääniradio/ Pixel Ache, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; RADIOPHONIC, Biannual of Radio Art, Brussels, Belgium; RadiaLX 2008, Lisbon, Portugal; Third Coast Audio Festival, Chicago, USA; Radiotesla, Tesla, Berlin, Germany; dLux Media Arts, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia and VIBGYOR Film Festival and Chetana Media Institute, Kerala, India.

He has been invited to speak at many noted programs including the Department of Techno-Cultural Studies, University of California, Davis, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands and California Institute of the Arts.

His research is published in the journal Soundscape and also Hearing Places: Sound, Place, Time, Culture, Cambridge Scholars Press. He is the President of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology. His collaborations with grass roots organizations such as the, Associatión Panamericana para la Concervación have increased awareness of the importance of natural places and disappearing soundscapes around the planet. He is the founder of The Sometimes Orchestra, an artists’ collective dedicated to the performance of sound and moving image works. Needham received his MFA from The School of Art at California Institute of the Arts and he is an Associate Professor in Audio Arts in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University.