Academia
My academic background spans two disciplines that have shaped everything I’ve done since. I began with physics at the Université de la Réunion, drawn by an early fascination with astronomy, before moving into audio and completing a Bachelor of Recording Arts (Honours) through Middlesex University UK and SAE Institute Australia.
Teaching and industry practice
For the past decade I’ve been Program Coordinator of Audio Production at Collarts in Melbourne, where I oversee curriculum, unit design, timetabling, and the day-to-day running of the programme alongside teaching. My areas of focus include advanced audio post production, surround sound mixing, Dolby Atmos, and music production.
A particular area of interest has been making immersive audio education workable in remote and online contexts. That led me to develop teaching frameworks for surround sound mixing delivered online using binaural streaming for Dolby Atmos, which is not a straightforward problem to solve and required building approaches from scratch.
I’ve also held lecturing roles at the Australian Institute of Music and the Abbey Road Institute, delivering masterclasses in music production and engineering.
PhD research: Nebulae
I’m currently undertaking a PhD at Griffith Film School in Brisbane. The research sits at the intersection of astrophotography, immersive media, and science communication, and draws on everything I’ve built across my career: astrophotography and image processing, music composition, sound design, storytelling, film design, and immersive technologies including VR, planetarium-scale projection, and spatial audio formats such as Dolby Atmos.
The central question is about how people experience astronomical imagery and what that experience can do for scientific engagement. Rather than presenting data as something to be read or studied, the aim is to design experiences that make it felt, building moments of genuine awe that are also scientifically grounded.
On the technical side, the project involves converting two-dimensional astrophotography into accurate three-dimensional nebula environments, drawing on data from the ESA’s Gaia telescope for stellar positioning alongside techniques including radio interferometry, spectral line analysis, polarimetric imaging, and hydrodynamic simulation to model the structure and behaviour of gaseous emission regions. The intended output is a large-scale immersive installation and a parallel VR experience.
Scientific contributions through astrophotography
Beyond the PhD, some of my astrophotography work has fed directly into active scientific research. Through the Deep Sky Collective, the collaborative group I work with, our deep imaging datasets have contributed to research papers by NASA astrophysicists studying new discoveries in the field. The integration depths we work at, often exceeding 500 hours on a single target, produce data capable of revealing structure that isn’t accessible through conventional exposure times, and that has made some of our images genuinely useful to researchers working at the frontier of these areas.
Student Work
My close relationship with Dolby Institute has brought some great opportunities to Collarts students. In particular I have pitched the idea for a Sound Design competition to Dolby which kindly accepted the offer. You can find the published article on Dolby Creators Lab and listen to the work of my student, Darcy Knorr who won the event.
Here is the excerpt from the Dolby site”
“Dolby partnered with Collarts to put together a competition that allowed their audio post-production students the chance to completely redesign an existing Dolby Atmos trailer. Participating students were provided with a copy of Nature’s Fury in a ProTools session and given the original, unmixed audio assets to work with. There were lots of impressive submissions, but Darcy Knorr’s audio reworking of the trailer stood out as the best of the bunch. Darcy was awarded a free license for the Dolby Atmos Production Suite for all his hard work.”
And here another one of my students feature on the Dolby Website. Bridgette did an amazing job sound designing, mixing and even writing the music for this beautiful video that was kindly kindly provided by Dominic Hook for my student to practice their Dolby Atmos skills.