photograph by Ponch Hawkes
Dr Ros Bandt is an internationally acclaimed sound artist, composer, musician, researcher and scholar. Since 1977 she has pioneered interactive sound installations, sound sculptures, and created sound playgrounds, aeolian harps spatial music systems, and some 50 sound installations worldwide. She has curated many sound performances, exhibitions and events. Her original works are recorded by Neuma records (USA), New Albion Records (USA), Move Records (Melbourne), EMI/ABC, Wergo (Germany), Ars Acoustica, (Germany), Double Moon (Turkey), Pozitif Müzik Yapim, Hearing Places, Sonic Gallery. Her vinyl rereleases have been published by Bedroom Suck Records, Daisart and Efficient Space.
In 1990 Bandt won the Don Banks Composers Award, being the first woman to do so. Other awards include the inaugural Benjamin Cohen Peace Prize in the USA and the Sound Art Australia Prize funded by the ABC and the Goethe Institute. She has been commissioned by the Paris Autumn festival, the Studio of Acoustic Art, WDR-Cologne, Centrum Ujadowsky Warsaw, Transit and ORF Vienna and was one of the six exquisites in the International Sound Art Festival in the USA. In 2019 she was commissioned by the Melbourne Recital Centre for their 10th birthday.
Ros Bandt is a multi-instrumentalist, and has been a founding member of many ensembles including the early music ensemble la Romanesca, the cross-cultural Back to Back Zithers, the improvisatory LIME, and the baroque trio Trio Avium. She is an expert recorder player and teacher having studied in Basel Switzerland with Andreas Küng, in Spain with Baldrick Deerenberg, and in Australia with Ruth Wilkinson. She is a passionate advocate of the long necked tarhu, a bowed spike fiddle invented by Australian luthier Peter Biffen. For a decade she has collaborated internationally with this instrument culminating in a double CD Tarhu Connections, available on Bandcamp. Her acoustic sanctuary in Central Victorian goldfields can be experienced in the digital online calendar over 12 months according to the seven seasons observed from the land. Jaara Jaara Seasons CD was sourced from this magic habitat. Two public events were shared here, the second Freshwater Listening celebrating twenty years of acoustic ecology in Australia. This Land for Wildlife is a wildlife sanctuary where recording sound is a barometric measure of presence and absence of different species.
Dr Bandt is a prolific writer on sound and her book, Sound Sculpture: Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks, (Fine Arts Press) is the first audio visual profile of Australian sound art. She created the first online sound art gallery, searchable data-base and web site merging sound art practice with academic research on her third ARC grant at the Australia Centre, the University of Melbourne, The Australian Sound Design Project. She has taught improvisation, sound art and frequently curated cross-cultural collaborative projects in ancient sites in the Mediterranean. She is in demand as a keynote speaker on sound, here and internationally.
AWARDS
1991 DON BANKS Composers award 1991, first woman. LINK
1992 SOUND ART AUSTRALIA PRIZE AND PRIX ITALIA (HM) Mungo. LINK 1 LINK 2
2006 Excellence for research award The University of Melbourne. LINK
2012 NFSA Cochrane Smith award for sound heritage. LINK
2013 Melbourne Prize for Music finalist. LINK
2020 Richard Gill Award for distinguished services to Australian Music 2020APRA/AMCOS 2020 Australian Music Awards LINK
2021-2022 Two year Fellowship for Emerging and Experimental Music, Australia Council.