My research is practice-based. It exists through a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to music and sound. Central preoccupations within this include: investigations into sound objects in different contexts (theatre, installation, concert hall); electroacoustic and multi-disciplinary improvisation, robot opera: performance, embodiment, vocality, and exploring time-lapse in audiovisual media and performance. 

My sound object composition work is most recently encapsulated in my new album strange birds released on 12 June 2026 on the Sargasso label. This CD contains selected works from the last 20 years, including my most recent acousmatic commission for Rainy Days Festival 2021 the eponymous strange birds, (an intimate cross hybridisation of voice, flute, bird and found sounds), and three crows (a meditation on mortality and otherness woven around text by Valerie Whittington), composed specifically for this release.

My electroacoustic trio Concrete Sun (with Heather Frasch and Myra Melford) recently released our debut album  the mundane uncanny on the Infrequent Seams label (February 2026). Our project Fragile Environments, which looks at creative responses to dealing wtih climate change anxiety, received support from the Peder Sather Program at the University of California, Berkeley, funding residencies in Berkeley and Trondheim in 2024 and 2025.  Concrete Sun explores real-time composition with found sounds, electronic textures and amplified inside-the-piano. Our work emerges through improvisations which we then structure into exploratory compositions deployed in real time performances, recorded and reworked in the studio.  I also have improvisation partners in the USA, where I perform regularly at Medicine for Nightmares (San Francisco) with Boohaabian multi reed player David Boyce, cellist  / perormance artist Chris Evans and percussionist PC Muñoz. Other improvisation partners I work with include paige starling sorvillo (dance / choreography); Kanoko Nishi (koto) and video artist Ian Winters.

My interdisiplinary work is currently concentrated on music and sound design for Crane.  Crane is a public art project illuminating the Hunters Point Shipyard Gantry Crane through projection, sound, music and community stories. The project will highlight and cleebrate the site’s layered cultural, historical and environmental legacy creating a monumental scale light, video and music performance in October 2026. My role as sound artist is to respond to the soundscape of the area, including searching for historical shipyard sounds to recreate the vanished shipyard; to collect and curate community voices, through oral history interviews conducted by the Shipyard Artist Trust, weaving these stories into the soundscape to evoke memories and honour the community struggles; to engage with the community through interction with local community choirs, working with them to create vocal elements of music for the final performance. I am releasing episodes of the soundtrack on the Crane website and as posdasts, whilst working towards a 40 minute sound/music perfromance (with lights and video by Elaine Buckholz and Ian Winters) collaborating with musicians David Boyce (sax and electronics); Scott Foster (guitars) and Cairo McCorkran (drums / percussion). 

The Robot Opera project, which I initiated in 2017, continues to garner interest. We (the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre) have been invited to contribute a talk for the Royal Ballet and Opera's inaugural Shift Festival (Opera and Technologies) in June 2026. Robot Opera investigates the meanings of our relationships with robotics and AI, with a focus on performance, embodiment, and vocality, through creative practice-based research and scholarly enquiry. The most recent iteration of this project was AI Perform!  (2024). For AI Perform!, researchers and artists in Robotics, AI, Music Technology, Opera, and Dance and teamed together to creatively explore a robotic performer prototype developed under supervision by a School of Engineering and Informatics PhD student, Dexter Shepherd,  in the Robotics Lab at the University of Sussex. Our core team of myself, Tim Hopkins, Chris Kiefer and Elizabeth Jochum (Aalborg University) put together a three-day Participatory Design Performance Hack Workshop, exploring robotics/AI, music technologies and performance. At the end of the workshop we shared out findings through a performance and discussion which took place on 27th March 2024 in teh Creativity Zone on the Sussex campus. This work fed into a publication we co-wrote: Towards Embodied AI: Design Approaches for Robots in Opera, in Cultural Technologies: Robots and Artificial Intelligence in the Performing Arts  Routledge, 2025.

Previous work in on the Robot Opera project includes Robo_Po /// Robo_Op, funded by MAH Knowledge Exchange and supported by the Sussex Humanities Lab, which took place in June 2021. This featured creative investigations in poetry and opera with a Mesmer Robot made by Engineered Arts, involving a wide number of creative collaborators in directing, choreography, poetry, animation and scenography. Earlier strands of the project include "Robot Opera - What's Next?" – a one day symposium on creative approaches to human-robot interaction, featuring a workshop performance whicih I devised, with the musicians, of "Here, Kittykitty", performed by singer Loré Lixenberg, cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, Pepper the robot, a robot cello and a robot cat, followed by a panel discussion featuring the artists with academics from the School of Informatics and the then School of Media, Film and Music. 

Other recent works include: What Larks (5'), for soprano, mixed ensemble and electronics, commissioned by the New Music Players and premiered at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts in June 2022; Submerged for solo cello (7'), commissioned for the Royal Academy of Music's RAM 200 project, and Strange Birds, a ten minute acousmatic piece commissioned by the Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg, both premiered in November 2021, which now features in my new CD strange birds (2026). Further back, other collaborative works include music and sound score for Listening Creates an Opening with Mary Armentrout Dance Theater, commissioned by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (EMPAC, 2018 and Oberlin Dance Commons Theater, May, 2019); Summer, Winter, Spring, a site specific installation / performance collaboration with media artist Ian Winters, exploring time-lapse film and audio on Market Street in downtown San Francisco, supported by funds from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and Sussex University, which premièred at the Minnesota Street Project, hosted by SF Arts Ed in San Francisco in January 2018.


My composition and sound art has received support from, among others, Luxembourg Philharmonie (Rainy Days), Arts Council of England, the London Arts Board, Sonic Arts Network, Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, Hinrichsen Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Meet the Composer and Poems on the Underground. My music has been heard in concert halls, theatres, music festivals, film festivals, on television and in radio broadcasts in the UK, Europe, the Americas, Australia and the Far East. My solo CD Frantic Mid-Atlantic is available on the Sargasso Label www.sargasso.com. I am currently working towards a new release with the trio Concrete Sun.

I have been writing music professionally since 1988. What appears on the Elements Publications page is a selection of more recent works. For a more thorough list, kindly consult my website, where you can download a 'list of works by genre' from this page: https://evelynficarra.net/about/