Practice
Ideas take shape
in the creative process.
The practice moves across pre-production, production and mixing. An involvement may begin with an early idea, develop through an ongoing collaboration, or focus on a particular part of a record.
The work involves listening for what gives a piece its character, exploring possibilities with the artist, and making decisions that support the performance. Sound design belongs within that process too: finding and shaping sounds that contribute to texture, atmosphere and emotional weight.
Space as part of
musical language.
Proximity, distance, movement and sonic perspective change how a performance is experienced. They can create intimacy or scale, clarify relationships between instruments, alter the listener’s point of view, or give a moment a different emotional weight.
Immersion is broader than a playback format; it is, above all, an artistic and experiential quality. It emerges through the relationships between performance, timbre, dynamics, arrangement, narrative and space, and how these invite the listener into the music. These are musical decisions before they are format decisions.
Technology serves the artist, the performance and the musical intention.
Research within the practice.
Jonathan’s research has focused on how space can become part of musical authorship: something shaped through composition, performance, sound architecture, recording and mixing.
The work draws on a much longer history of thinking about music in space, from opera and theatre to contemporary record production. At its centre is the listener: how a musical scene establishes a sense of presence, intimacy and engagement.
The research developed a model connecting distance and balance, identity and vocal staging, the listener’s position, and space as musical material. It considers immersion, presence and embodiment through the experience they create.
The research feeds back into practice: making spatial decisions more deliberate, and giving clearer language to how space can support musical form, emotion, narrative and the listener’s experience.
