Associate researcher
As an artistic researcher, Cat’s sonic practice focuses on the composition and performance of low frequency sound in both literal and conceptual frameworks. She explores systems for creating and reading graphic notations for music that facilitate this interest, including leading the software development team for the Decibel ScorePlayer application. Hope also researches early Australian electronic music, composers such as Percy Grainger, Giacinto Scelsi and Fausto Romitelli, digital archiving for music, art activism and issues around gender in music.
She is a politically engaged artist and scholar with a passion for music innovation and experimentation. Cat has Bachelor of Music (Performance) with Honours, and won the University Research Prize for Outstanding Thesis when her PhD in Art was conferred by RMIT University in 2010. She has been awarded a Churchill Fellowship (2013), a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship (2014) and a Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship (2022). She has been a visiting Professor at Kings College London (2023) and the Visby International Composers Centre in Sweden (2014, 2025). She has authored and co-authored over 75 refereed journal articles and conference proceedings, 17 book chapters and 6 books, including as co-author of the book Digital Arts – An Introduction to New Media (Bloomsbury, 2014) and co-editor of Contemporary Musical Virtuosities with Louise Devenish (Routledge, 2023). Cat was a member of the Australian Research Council Creative Arts and Humanities College of Experts from 2017-2019, is an assessor for the European Research Council, and has been the chair of the International Technologies of Music Notation and Representation (TENOR) conference since 2021.
Cat’s music has been discussed in books such as Hidden Alliances (Schimmana, 2019), Sonic Writing (Magnusson, 2019), Loading the Silence (Kouvaris, 2013), Women of Note (Appleby, 2012), Sounding Postmodernism (Bennett, 2011) as well as periodicals such as Gramophone, The Wire, Limelight, and Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Cat’s 2017 monograph CD ‘Ephemeral Rivers’ (Hat[Art]Hut) won the German Record Critics prize that year, when Gramophone magazine called her “one of Australia’s most exciting and individual creative voices.” Her music is published by Material Press (Germany) and Hat [Art] Hut (Switzerland). As a performer, she works as a flautist with Eliane Radigue (France), Lionel Marchetti and internationally Decibel new music ensemble. She maintains an improvised bass noise practice as a soloist and in bands Super Luminum, Hz Hz Hz and Candied Limbs. Cat is Professor of Music at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
