About

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Katharine Norman‘s music and sound art for instruments and digital resources is frequently inspired by people’s experience of place and landscape. She has also written and published extensively on soundscape and place, as well as producing experimental digital fiction and non-fiction.

Her more recent performance works explore interactive image, text and sound. They include Making Place, commissioned by pianist Kate Halsall, A walk I do, for Carla Rees; and Paul’s Walk, for Paul Roe. Other works are for sound, performance and feature her speaking her own texts. For instance, Fuga Interna (begin), for piano and digital sound is based on her memories of learning piano and her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. It has been performed widely, in particular by Xenia Pestova.

Her publications on sound and art are often literary or experimental in nature and include Sounding Art, an experimental book on digital music and aesthetics (Ashgate/Routledge) and a number of book chapters and essays in various collections. As a creative writer, her digital fiction and non-fiction have featured in various festivals, publications and conferences. Window (for John Cage), an interactive ‘sound-essay’, won the 2012 New Media Writing Prize.

Katharine Norman received her PhD in composition from Princeton, focusing on computer music. For some time she worked in academia, where she directed the Electronic Music Studios at Goldsmiths College, London and later headed the studios at City University London, before deciding to find other strategies for continuing as a composer and writer (i.e. she got the hell out of there). For the past 10 years or so she has worked primarily in academic and reference publishing, to support her creative work. In 2020 she moved to live on an island off the West Coast of BC, Canada. Nobody has found her yet.