Simon Barker co-leads several internationally recognised collaborative ensembles including Chiri (with Scott Tinkler and Bae Il Dong), Showa 44 (with Carl Dewhurst) and Band of Five Names (with Phil Slater and Matt McMahon). In addition to his numerous solo performances and recordings, Simon also performs with many of Australia’s most established ensembles and is a lecturer in Drumset and Rhythm Awareness at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Katelyn Barney is Associate Professor in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit and affiliated with the School of Music at the University of Queensland. Her research focuses on improving pathways for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students into and through higher education, and advancing understanding about the role of collaborative research and music-making between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous people. She has published across these areas and recently edited the book Musical Collaboration between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous People in Australia: Exchanges in the Third Space (Routledge, 2023). She is also Managing Editor of The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education.

William Barton is one of Australia’s leading didjeridu players as well as a composer, instrumentalist and vocalist. William first learnt the instrument from his uncle, Arthur Peterson, an elder of the Wannyi, Lardil and Kalkadunga people, and was working from an early age with traditional dance groups and fusion/rock jazz bands, orchestras, string quartets and mixed ensembles. Throughout his diverse career he has forged a path in the classical musical world, from the London, Berlin and Bremer Philharmonic Orchestras to historic events at Westminster Abbey for Commonwealth Day 2019, at Anzac Cove in Gallipoli and for the Beijing Olympics.

Lou Bennett is a Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Wurrung woman and a prolific songwriter/composer who worked for ten years with internationally acclaimed music trio Tiddas (1990−2000). Bennett’s work stretches over a vast area within the arts industry throughout the past twenty-nine years including her various roles as performer, songwriter, musical and artistic director, composer, actor, sound designer and educator. Bennett co-founded the Black Arm Band in 2006 and contributed to all productions by the company. Bennett holds a PhD exploring the importance and relevance of Aboriginal language retrieval, reclamation and regeneration through the medium of the arts to community health and wellbeing.

Kristin Berardi is from Koumala, outside of Mackay in Queensland. She currently resides in Lucerne, Switzerland, as a professor in jazz voice at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She has won international and national awards for her singing and compositions, including Montreux Jazz Festival’s Shure International Jazz Vocal Competition (2006) and the National Jazz Awards (2012). She has been teaching in tertiary institutions for the past eighteen years in jazz voice.

Kate Bowan is a historical musicologist who explores the intersections between musicology and social and political history, with a particular focus on transnational history and musical internationalism. She is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University.

Clint Bracknell is a Noongar song-maker, composer and Professor of Music at the University of Western Australia. He investigates connections between song, language and landscapes while working on projects to improve Indigenous community access to cultural heritage collections. Clint received the 2020 Barrett Award for Australian Studies and has co-translated world-first Indigenous language works in film and theatre. He serves as Deputy Chair of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) Council and maintains a significant creative research agenda, leading development of the Mayakeniny Noongar performance resource site and releasing music under the name Maatakitj.

Reuben Brown is a non-Indigenous (Settler/Balanda) ethnomusicologist and ARC DECRA Research Fellow with the Research Unit for Indigenous Languages, University of Melbourne. Reuben has co-authored publications with Indigenous Australian ceremony leaders as well as musicologists, linguists, anthropologists and historians on the relationship between multilingualism and song in Arnhem Land and the re-use of archival recordings to support transmission of Indigenous knowledge, among other topics. His ARC DECRA project ‘Modern Diplomacy: Understanding Ceremonial Exchange at Indigenous Festivals’ investigates how ceremonial performance at Indigenous festivals in northern Australia enacts diplomacy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants, and between different clan and language groups.

Tim Byron is a Lecturer at the School of Psychology, University of Wollongong. He is the co-author of Hooks in Popular Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) which combines the field of music psychology with pop musicology to understand how hooks work in popular music and why they get stuck in our heads. His research focuses on music cognition and in particular music and memory, with recent research focusing on the causes of ‘earworms’. He teaches topics including cognition and the history of psychology. He is also a performing musician and songwriter.

Laura Case is a Lecturer in Musicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Her research looks at the social and cultural history of music in Australia with a particular focus on the violin, cross-cultural interactions and feminist perspectives. She is also passionate about using music to reframe Indigenous histories and reclaim Indigenous knowledge. Laura is a descendent of the Wiradjuri people of Central West New South Wales and a classical violinist with over twenty years of performing and teaching experience.

Christopher Coady is the Associate Dean for Research Education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and an Associate Professor in Musicology. He is the author of John Lewis and the Challenge of ‘Real’ Black Music (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and a range of articles on historic and contemporary jazz practice, music research training and Black American art music history. His sole-authored and co-authored work has appeared in the British Journal of Music Education, Jazz Research Journal, American Music, Jazz and Culture and the Musical Quarterly.

Aaron Corn is Professor and Inaugural Director of the Indigenous Knowledge Institute at the University of Melbourne. He works closely in co-designed research with Australian Indigenous colleagues and communities and serves as Director of the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia. He instigated the formation of the International Council for Traditional Music’s Indigenous Study Group in 2022 and previously worked as Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music at the University of Adelaide. His best-selling book, Law: The Way of the Ancestors (Thames & Hudson, 2023), was co-authored with the Distinguished Professor Marcia Langton AO. Together, they co-host the podcast The Deep End with Marcia Langton and Aaron Corn. He has worked with his co-author in this book, the late Professor Brian Gumbula-Garawirrtja, since 1998.

Louise Devenish is a percussionist whose creative practice blends performance, artistic research methodologies and creative collaboration with composers, visual artists, designers and improvisors. Louise is currently undertaking an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship at Monash University (2020–2023), where she is Director of the artistic research project ‘The Sound Collectors Lab’ and Percussion Coordinator. Louise’s creative work has been recognised by a Churchill Fellowship, WA Music Awards and numerous APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards, including Performance of the Year Award and a Luminary Award. Her writing on new music is published in academic books and journals, industry publications and zines.

Michelle Duffy is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Newcastle. She is a cultural geographer whose research examines how festivals are used to address issues of community identity, social cohesion and resilience, and has focused on the role of emotion, affect and arts practices, especially the role sound and movement play in creating, enhancing and challenging these relationships.

Laura Glitsos is a Lecturer in the School of Creative Humanities at Edith Cowan University. She has been a health and medical journalist as well as a professional musician, winning two West Australian Music Awards for her work as a vocalist. She has also published across Media and Cultural Studies, with a particular focus on Popular Music Studies. Her first sole-authored book is titled Somatechnics and Popular Music in Digital Contexts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Talisha Goh (she/they) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Australian Research Council project ‘Diversifying Music in Australia: Gender Equity in Jazz and Improvisation’ at Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance, Monash University. Talisha’s work has centred on the experiences of current and historical marginalised groups in Australian music, with an emphasis on fostering equity and sustainability throughout the performing arts sector. This interest is reflected throughout her diverse research activity in publications including Frontiers in Education, Musicology Australia, Tempo, British Journal of Music Education, Personnel Review and Journal of Vocational Behavior.

Ben Green is a cultural sociologist of popular music and youth, with interests including live music, heritage and regional music. As a Griffith University Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, he is investigating crisis and reinvention in the Australian live music sector. He is the author of Peak Music Experiences: A New Perspective on Popular Music, Identity and Scenes (Routledge, 2022) and co-editor of Popular Music Scenes: Regional and Rural Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

Brian Djaṉgirrawuy Gumbula-Garawirrtja was a Yolŋu elder and ceremonial leader of the Gupapuyŋu clan from north-east Arnhem Land. He was fully trained in Yolŋu law and responsible for its transmission to future generations. He engaged in many research projects on Yolŋu law and culture over the past thirty years and was appointed as a Professorial Fellow of the Indigenous Knowledge Institute at the University of Melbourne in 2022. He was the first Yolŋu person to be appointed as a full professor. He examined how Yolŋu law is represented in the university’s vintage collections of Yolŋu cultural heritage and also undertook research into native bees and historical Yolŋu trade with Makassar seafarers. Before sadly passing away in 2023, he and his family gave full permission for his name and images to continue being used for professional purposes. In death, he endures eternally as the fierce Gupapuyŋu honeybee ancestor, Niwuda.

Amanda Harris is an ARC Future Fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, and Director of the Sydney Unit of digital archive PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures). Amanda is interested in hearing the voices of those often excluded from conventional music histories through collaborative research focused on gender and intercultural musical cultures. She is author of the monograph Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930–70  (Bloomsbury, 2020) and co-editor with Linda Barwick and Jakelin Troy of Music, Dance and the Archive (Sydney University Press, 2022).

Cat Hope is an artist scholar with an active profile as a composer, sound artist, soloist and performer in music groups internationally. In 2013 she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to study digital graphic music notations internationally, and she is a fellow of Civitella Ranieri and the Hamburg Institute of Advanced Study. Cat is the director and founder of the Decibel New Music Ensemble, co-author of Digital Arts: An Introduction to New Media (Bloomsbury, 2014), and co-editor of Contemporary Musical Virtuosities (Routledge, 2024) and has published over forty peer-reviewed papers, chapters and books.

Catherine Ingram is a Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (SCM, University of Sydney, Australia), following research fellowships at SOAS (University of London, UK), the International Institute of Asian Studies (the Netherlands) and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Her interest in Chinese music began with study of the erhu as an undergraduate student; she led establishment of the SCM’s Chinese Music Ensemble in 2016 and was the ensemble’s coordinator, lecturer and curriculum designer for several years. She has published widely on Kam (or Dong) minority music of southwestern China, her main research focus for many years.

Andrea Keller is an Australian improvising pianist and composer, dedicated to the performance and creation of contemporary jazz and improvised music. She has devised and produced a multitude of projects, ranging from solo to large ensembles steeped in both jazz and Western art music traditions, and is the winner of multiple ARIA and Australian Jazz ‘Bell’ Awards. Andrea is also the Head of Jazz and Improvisation at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne.

Liu Lu 刘璐 (also known as Lulu Liu) is a China-trained pipa performer and Australia-trained scholar who received her PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Sydney in 2019. She has published ethnomusicological research investigating intercultural music engagement while continuing to perform new pipa works by contemporary Australian composers. She is a Lecturer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (SCM), where she has directed the Chinese Music Ensemble and Chinese instrumental performance programme for several years. Lulu also teaches pipa as a principal study to undergraduate and postgraduate students and acts as SCM’s Senior Advisor for Chinese music strategy.

Paul (Mac) McDermott teaches in the Bachelor of Music Studies (Contemporary Music Practice) programme at Sydney Conservatorium of Music. In 2021, he was awarded a Doctor of Musical Arts, which focused on creating a unique compositional voice fusing electronic dance music (EDM) traditions with experimental practice. His research interest focuses on Australian dance music history, building on his practice history as a participant in the EDM scene. As a solo artist, he has been awarded a Best Dance Release ARIA for ‘Just the Thing’ (2021), and as half of rave pioneers Itch-E & Scratch-E, he was awarded the same for their track ‘Sweetness & Light’ (1995). He has collaborated with Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns on The Dissociatives (2004). As one half of Stereogamous, he has been commissioned to remix artists including Kylie Minogue, Sia, George Michael and Rufus du Sol. His most recent work, The Rise & Fall of St. George, has been performed at Melbourne’s Hamer Hall (2020) and the Sydney Festival (2021).

ELIZABETH Mackinlay is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University (SCU). She holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Adelaide (1998) and a PhD in Education from the University of Queensland (2003). Elizabeth’s current research focuses on gender, decoloniality and education – more specifically, feminism and higher education, issues of consent education in universities and university residential colleges, and decoloniality in the academy. Elizabeth is the Chair of Ethics at SCU. Externally she sits on the editorial board of the journal Qualitative Research and is the Ethics section editor for the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Qualitative Research. She is also the founder of DRAW: Departing Radically in Academic Writing.

Stephen Magnusson is one of the most versatile and distinctive musicians in Australia, making him an indispensable part of many bands and film scores. He has performed with artists including Charlie Haden’s Music Liberation Orchestra, Meshell Ndegeocello, Rickie-lee Jones, Tim Berne, George Garzone, the Australian Art Orchestra and many others. Stephen was awarded the Swiss Diagonal Arts Grant and the Pop Kredit award in 1999, was a co-winner of the 2000 National Jazz Award and in 2007 won the Melbourne Prize for Music.

Toby Martin is a historian, musician and songwriter living and working on Gadigal-Wangal land, currently also known as Sydney. His publications include the books Yodelling Boundary Riders: Country Music in Australia since the 1920s (Lyrebird Press, 2015) and Because the Music Is Very Immense: Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Popular Music (CUP, in press). He has released eight albums, both with the band Youth Group and under his own name, and has won an ARIA award. His most recent musical release is TÌNH KHÚC TỪ QUÊ HƯƠNG/Songs From Home (with Dang Lan). Toby is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Music Practice at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney.

Bonnie B. McConnell is Senior Lecturer in the School of Music at the Australian National University. Her research examines music in relation to issues of health, identity and social change in West Africa and Australia. McConnell is the author of the monograph Music, Health, and Power: Singing the Unsayable in The Gambia (Routledge, 2019). The book received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Kwabena Nketia Prize, which recognises the most distinguished book on the music of Africa and the African diaspora published during the past three years.

Karl Neuenfeldt trained academically in Anthropology (MA, Simon Fraser University, Canada), Cultural Studies (PhD, Curtin University, Australia) and History (PhD, Murdoch University, Australia). He has also worked professionally as a music producer, performer and researcher. In 2009 he received the Sound Heritage Award from the Australian National Film and Sound Archives for his collaborative work with Indigenous communities on music and research projects.

Nicholas Ng 黄建文 is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture (Western Sydney University). Published widely in the area of Australian Chinese music, Nicholas established the ANU Chinese Classical Music Ensemble (2003) and curated the festival ENCOUNTERS: China (2010). He has toured to international festivals such as the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) and Sydney Festival, and has composed for The Song Company, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and other ensembles. Nicholas teaches erhu and Western harmony at Sydney Conservatorium. His work has been documented on SBS Mandarin Radio, ABC Music Show and in the ABC Compass programme ‘Divine Rhythms’.

Jamie Oehlers is one of Australia’s leading jazz artists and saxophonists. He has performed around the world at major festivals such as the JVC Jazz Festival in New York, London Jazz Festival, Montreux Jazz Festival and the Edinburgh Jazz Festival. Jamie has been a saxophone and improvisation tutor at multiple universities since 1998, and in 2008 became the Head of Jazz Studies at WAAPA. He is now the Associate Dean of Music and has recently completed his PhD on reflexive practice within improvisation.

Jadey O’Regan is a Lecturer in Contemporary Music Practice at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (University of Sydney) and is the co-author of Hooks in Popular Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), a book which uses an interdisciplinary approach to pop musicology and music psychology to understand hooks, a defining feature of modern pop music. Her research interests include pop analysis, musical genre, songwriting and creativity. She teaches songwriting, production, performance and music history, and is a music communicator in media. She is also a songwriter and performing musician.

Ian Rogers is currently a Senior Lecturer in Music Industries at RMIT, Melbourne. He is the author of numerous papers and book chapters on musician ideologies, music policy and local music history, and the author of Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) with Andy Bennett.

Christopher Sainsbury is an Australian composer who composes in various genres, and his recent works include the opera The Visitors, commissioned by Richard Mills for the Victorian Opera Company’s 2023 season; a string-orchestra work String Talk, commissioned by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; and Ocean Song, an album of ambient surf music for the Random Earth Band, which features legendary Australian guitarist Guy Strazz and Chris on guitars. Chris is of mixed heritage including English, Irish, Dutch and Dharug/Eora – the Aboriginal region of Sydney and surrounds. He is an Associate Professor in Composition at the Australian National University, and won the (APRA) Luminary Award in 2020 for his work in further shaping the classical and new music sector in Australia through the Ngarra-burria First Peoples Composers programme.

Aline Scott-Maxwell is an ethnomusicologist, popular music studies scholar and performer with teaching and research specialisations in Asian and Australian musical cultures. Her current research focuses on historical and contemporary aspects of Australia’s musical engagement with Asia and the popular music of Australian migration. She has published extensively in these areas and was also Co-General Editor of the Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia (Currency House, 2003). Her co-written book about contemporary music in Melbourne will be published during 2024. She is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance at Monash University.

Nardi Simpson is a Yuwaalaraay storyteller from the NSW northwest freshwater plains. A musician, composer and playwright, Nardi is the author of Song of the Crocodile (Hachette Australia, 2020). Song of the Crocodile was the 2018 winner of the black&write Fellowship and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writing category. While currently working on her second novel, Nardi continues to perform with vocal duo Stiff Gins, works with student ensembles and directs the cross-cultural choir Barayagal at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Nardi is currently undertaking a PhD in Composition at the Australian National University researching the traditions of song and story in her beloved Yuwaalaraay homelands.

Gian Slater is a prolific vocalist and composer based in Melbourne, with an approach that incorporates wordless singing and improvisation, songwriting, electronics and extended vocal techniques, new music and contemporary composition, and collaborations with theatre and dance practitioners. She has released eight albums of her original music and has featured on many projects and recordings for acclaimed Australian and American artists.

Phil Slater is a trumpeter, composer and band leader based in Wollongong, NSW, and a Senior Lecturer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He has performed and recorded with a wide range of music artists and has released ten recordings as a leader or co-leader; he has composed and performed original music for theatre, cinema and television. Phil was awarded a PhD in 2020 and has an interest in skill acquisition, expertise and motor learning.

Lamine Sonko is a director, composer and multi-instrumentalist, originally from Senegal, who has lived in Melbourne since 2004. In his artistic practice he draws on traditional wisdom to create inter-disciplinary and multi-sensory arts experiences inspired by his Senegalese cultural background as a Gewel (hereditary cultural role) to be a keeper and communicator of history, customs, rituals and sacred knowledge through music, dance and oral storytelling. In his artistic practice he draws on these ancient concepts to present to audiences in a current and tangible form that seeks to evoke new community consciousness, connection and unity in diversity.

Sally Treloyn (non-Indigenous) is an applied ethnomusicologist with a primary area specialism in Indigenous song-dance practices and historical collections relating to the Kimberley region. Treloyn has published widely on the compositional practices and processes of Indigenous song and, over the last decade, on issues of archives and access, repatriation, sustainability and revitalisation. Treloyn is Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology and Intercultural Research and Co-Director of the Research Unit for Indigenous Arts and Cultures in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne.

Michael Webb is an ethnomusicologist specialising in the post-European contact history of music in the southwest Pacific Islands. In 2015 he was awarded the Journal of Pacific History’s annual prize for the article judged to have made the most significant contribution to histories of Oceania. His work has also been published in Ethnomusicology, The Contemporary Pacific, Journal of the Polynesian Society, Australian Historical Studies and elsewhere.

John Whiteoak is an Adjunct Professor in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance, Monash University, with a background in historical musicology, jazz studies and popular music studies. He was Co-General Editor of and the major contributor to the Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia and has published very widely on colonial-era and twentieth-century music and dance in Australasia, including Hispanic and Continental European music and dance influences. His most recent book was ‘Take Me to Spain’: Australian Imaginings of Spain through Music and Dance (Lyrebird Press, 2019), and he is currently completing Rag-Time Australia: Music, Dance, Race, ‘Revolution’ and War Before Australia’s Jazz Age.

Aaron Wyatt is a violist, violinist, conductor, composer, programmer and academic. Originally from Perth, he spent many years as a regular casual with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra before moving to Melbourne to take up a position as Assistant Lecturer at Monash University. A member of the Decibel New Music ensemble, he also develops their animated graphic notation app, the Decibel ScorePlayer. In 2021 he became the first Indigenous Australian to conduct a state symphony orchestra in concert, and has since gone on to have engagements with the Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, as well as being the artistic director of Ensemble Dutala.