Leo Murray

In science fiction cinema, futuristic vehicles have often been accompanied by futuristic sound design. Now that some of that futuristic travel is becoming reality, how much of the sound from cinema has made its way into the thinking for actual vehicles?

Since electric vehicles became viable as a practical alternative to ICE vehicles sound has been a challenge. Making little inherent sound of their own, other than rolling tyre noise, the external and internal sound of a vehicle is an interesting sound design case study. Once regulatory requirements relating to safety have been taken into account there is a good deal of leeway in how an EV sounds to the occupants and to pedestrians outside the vehicle.

The sound of electric vehicles is increasingly important as a selling point, as well as fulfilling practical functions such as safety and driver feedback. But the emotional connection to a vehicle – the thing that makes people want to drive, or own, such a vehicle – can be influenced by sound design. Film sound design is often about creating an emotional connection, so it is perhaps not surprising that automotive sound designers look to cinema as a source of inspiration. This paper examines the influence of cinematic sound design on vehicle sound design.

Agriculture is routinely perceived as bucolic, benign or beneficial, while behaviours of wild species are often understood as reflecting natural patterns. Anthropogenic underpinnings of food systems and animal behaviours can be invisible in standard cinematography without multi-modal cues to increase perception and prompt deeper understandings of less apparent forces. In Grained responds to the need for creative, practice-led research inquiry to prompt deeper interpretation. An interdisciplinary collaboration spanning landscape studies, sound design, filmmaking and performance reveals how industrial food systems reconfigure place, species relations and crucially, our perceptions of such entanglements. Focused on the Ord River Irrigation Scheme on Miriwoong and Gajirrabeng Country, this original audiovisual work stages deceptively bucolic drone footage of sorghum harvesting contrasted by suggestive glitching visual intrusions and a two layer sound design with scripted performance. Visual and sonic material suggests layered socioecological infrastructures—remaking catchment scale ecologies for freshwater capture and redistribution, visible and hidden architectures of industrial agribusiness, empire and racism, labour and capital flows, and multispecies codependence on agri-systems. In Grained combines original and archival cinematography, place-attuned sound design, scripting and acted audio performances and gallery staging with dedicated props to invite sustained, embodied attention and slow contemplation. It was exhibited at Form Gallery in Claremont, Perth, 30 Oct–25 Nov 2025 in an exhibition titled ‘Transversal’, curated by Moving Image Lab Perth (MILP). Eleven artists works’ spanned video art, expanded cinema, and experimental documentary, and were refined during a laboratory residency.

This article explores Anthropoiesis, the authors’ eco-performance installation presented as part of the European Cultural Centre’s Time, Space, Existence  exhibition at the Venice Biennial during the Venice Biennale Architettura 2023. Drawing on David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics (2019), the project investigated how ecocritical texts might be reconceived as multisensory artworks, advancing the concept of slow listening to engage with the Anthropocene’s scalar extremes. By integrating spoken word performance, soundscapes and visual poetry, Anthropoiesis sought to disrupt anthropocentric narratives, compelling audiences to confront the disorienting temporal and spatial dynamics of ecological crises. Foregrounding the urgency of improving attunement to landscapes, the article situates Anthropoiesis within the broader challenge of anthropogenic planetary destabilisation. Its multidisciplinary design reimagines Farrier’s ecocritical text as a sonic and visual assemblage, layered with living, organic and technologically generated soundscapes. Positioned within a nested exhibition alongside Ainslie Murray’s Registry of Itinerant Architectures and Joshua Zeunert’s Shallow Roots, Deep Incisions, offered a multisensory exploration of fluctuating scales and temporal horizons, creating an immersive experience to transcend traditional narrative structures. The article argues that sonic ecologies can help to reorient audiences within fractured Anthropocenic landscapes. Through the lens of slow listening, it analyses how the installation provokes reflection, destabilises linear perceptions of time and space and facilitates poiesis as a threshold moment of ecological revelation. Discussion moves from the project’s interdisciplinary approach to examine the transformative possibilities of careful listening as a critical and creative intervention. In doing so, it seeks to foster heightened attentiveness to more-than-human presences and advance collaborative performance-making to address the sublime tensions of the Anthropocenic moment.

Australian playwright David Finnigan's Scenes from the Climate Era is a controversial and exciting new work exploring climate change's impacts and trajectories through a series of postmodern vignettes. This production combined pedagogical inquiry and practice-based innovation to explore how the original black box theatre staging at Belvoir Theatre, Sydney, could be reimagined into an immerse multimedia experience. Murdoch University's final year Theatre and Creative Production students performed in-the-round in a white box Sound Stage illuminated by three sides of original video scenography created by Dannon Wu. Research outcomes include new scenographic methods incorporating historical footage, animation, soundscape by Leo Murray and lighting by Tim Brain to enhance the audience's sensory experience of the play and its ecological messaging.

Anthropoiesis is a soundscape installation created for the 2023 Venice Biennale containing poetic spoken word, music, location sound recordings, and sonifications inviting us to reconfigure our relations with time, space and existence in the Anthropocene age. It asks: what does it mean to live enfolded by deep time when humans have become a new geologic agent? Given that poiesis is to make, transform, or bring forth, how can we reimagine our geologic future? Where is beauty to be found amidst the terror of biodiversity loss and climate change and how can we create a sublime poetics of kin-making? This assemblage of ‘sound debris’ combines organic and human-constructed landscapes recorded on sites across Western and Central Australia and beyond. These reflect the many scales and layers of more-than-human existence, from the granular to expansive. Sounds are layered with new writing and text adapted from David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics (2019).

Anthropoiesis is a soundscape inviting us to reconfigure our relations with time, space and existence in the

Anthropocene age. It asks: what does it mean to live enfolded by deep time when humans have become a new

geologic agent? Given that poiesis is to make, transform, or bring forth, how can we reimagine our geologic future? Where is beauty to be found amidst the terror of biodiversity loss and climate change and how can we

create a sublime poetics of kin-making? This assemblage of ‘sound debris’ combines organic and human-constructed landscapes recorded on sites across Western and Central Australia and beyond. These reflect the

many scales and layers of more-than-human existence, from the granular to expansive. Sounds are layered with

new writing and text adapted from David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics (2019).

(PDF) Anthropoiesis: Eco-Performance project at ECC, Venice Biennale 2023. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370155660_Anthropoiesis_Eco-Performance_project_at_ECC_Venice_Biennale_2023#fullTextFileContent [accessed May 19 2023].

Advertising is selling us a dream, a lifestyle. It promises us fulfilment and tells us where to buy it - from international flights to a vast array of goods we consume like there is no tomorrow. The truth is, if advertising succeeds in keeping us on our current trajectory, there may not be a tomorrow.

In Badvertising, Andrew Simms and Leo Murray raise the alarm about an industry that is making us both unhealthy and unhappy, and that is driving the planet to the precipice of environmental collapse in the process.

What is the psychological impact of being barraged by literally thousands of advertisements a day? How does the commercialisation of our public spaces weaken our sense of belonging? How are car manufacturers, airlines and oil companies lobbying to weaken climate action? Examining the devastating impact of advertising on our minds and the planet, Badvertising also crucially explores what we can do to change things for the better.

Sound design research methods can vary considerably depending on the nature of the field of practice. A semiotic method provides a valuable approach to sound design in that it accounts for the individual differences in interpretation of sound stimuli, and is one which can be applied to a range of sound usages such as film and television, interactive, auditory display and product sound design. At its heart is a fundamental belief that there are building blocks of thought and perception which shape our ability to make meaning from any sign, including sounds.