Associate Professor Lawrence Harvey
Details
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Department: School of Design
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Campus: City Campus Australia
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lawrence.harvey@rmit.edu.au
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ORCID:
0000-0002-2099-8846
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LinkedIn
Open to
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
- Collaborative projects
- Media enquiries
- Membership of an advisory committee
- Teaching provision
- Industry Projects
About
Associate Professor Lawrence Harvey is a composer, sound designer, researcher and teacher based in the School of Design at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is founding director of SIAL Sound Studios, a facility established in 2004 and dedicated to research, teaching, and spatial sound in design and music.
His recent collaborations have included Safehold (Choreography Sandy Parker), which won the 2025 Victorian Green Room Award for Outstanding Choreography, and The Planting – a futuring work by leading indigenous thinkers and speaker orchestra concerts for the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC) and the Design and Sonic Practice (DSP) Research Group at RMIT, and Site and Sound an exhibition and performance program for Mclelland Sculpture Park and Gallery.
He has supervised over 20 PhD and Masters completions by candidates researching in spatial sound performance, computer music, technology for sound, architecture, digital modelling, soundscape studies and acoustic ecology, sound installation and acoustics. His peer reviewed publications cover a similar range of topics, and pedagogical approaches to sound in design, speaker orchestra practice, and curating and collecting sonic art.
After establishing the RMIT Speaker Orchestra in the early 2000’s, he has curated, directed and performed 34 concerts on the system. The 32 loudspeaker system can be used for traditional two channel diffusion and a range of multichannel formats. He co-leads the Design and Sonic Practice (DSP) Research Group, and collaborated on founding the RMIT Sonic Arts Collection.
He has directed large research projects funded by the Australian Research Council, and industry funded projects in urban soundscape research and spatial sound performance. In addition to electroacoustic compositions, he has produced gallery and urban sound installations, spatial sound designs for VR and theatre, and performed in Melbourne, Seoul, Huddersfield, The Hague and Vienna. For further details <https://sialsound.studio>
Academic positions
- co-Program Manager
- RMIT University
- Master of Design Innovation Technology
- Melbourne, Australia
- 15 Jan 2022 – 15 Dec 2024
- Associate Dean Research (Interim)
- RMIT University
- School of Design
- Melbourne, Australia
- 1 Feb 2018 – 1 Mar 2019
- Director
- School of Design, RMIT University
- SIAL Sound Studios
- Melbourne, Australia
- 4 Feb 2002 – 18 Dec 2030
Supervisor projects
- Between Interactive and Spatial Musicking: A Holistic Instrument Framework
- 10 Feb 2025
- Acoustic Sovereignties: Aboriginal Sonic Culture through Spatial Audio
- 4 Jul 2024
- The Music Producer As Designer
- 12 Apr 2024
- Sonic Utopias: Reclaiming Radical Imagination Through Spatial Electroacoustic Performance
- 8 Jan 2024
- Patterns for performance: an approach to enhancing performance via application of deployable surface geometries
- 22 Jun 2022
- A Mobility of Sound Design Exploring a Listener Centred Approach to the Design of Sound
- 15 Mar 2019
- Listening for Design: Urban Sonic Experience and the Sonic Identity Model
- 17 Jan 2019
- Thriving in an equilibrium of disorder: Mid-career professional classical musicians' diverse artistic activities in music
- 10 Dec 2018
- Agile Recorder: An Iterative Chamber of Practice
- 22 Feb 2016
- Improvising Polyrhythmic Space: Exploring a Continuum of Musico-Spatial Creative Practice
- 2 Mar 2015
- Wall of Noise, Web of Silence
- 10 Feb 2014
- Spatial Audio Engineering: exploring height in acoustic space
- 20 Jul 2009
Teaching interests
HDR Supervision Interests: Spatial sound composition and performance for large-scale diffusion systems, design pedagogy for sound-based studies, soundscape research of urban environments
Leadership and engagement:
- Director, SIAL Sound Studios, School of Design 2002, ongoing
- Co-Group Leader Design and Sonic Practice 2022, ongoing
- Co-Program Manager, Master of design, Innovation and Technology (MDIT) - January 2022 to July 2024
- Acting HDR Coordinator - February -July 2019
- Project Leader: Sound, Music, Acoustics (SoMA) - February 2019 - December 2020
Research interests
Electroacoustic Music Composition
Speaker Orchestra Curation and Performance
Spatial Sound
Urban Soundscape Studies
Acoustic Design
Performances cultures in research and the arts
