Associate Professor Darrin Verhagen
Details
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College: School of Design
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Department: School of Design
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Campus: City Campus Australia
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darrin.verhagen@rmit.edu.au
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ORCID: 0000-0001-6994-3304
Open to
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
About
Darrin Verhagen is an award-winning sound designer and composer, working across a range of media. He is a senior lecturer in Design, and runs the Audiokinetic Experiments (AkE) Lab.
Darrin teaches into the Sound Design specialisation in the Digital Media Program. His work in the AkE Lab uses sound, motion simulators, 4D cinema seating, an light to create and audit works that explore the relationship between hearing, vision, movement and vibration.
Darrin's postgraduate research focused on musical extremes – the delicate instability of lowercase sound for his Masters, and the brutality of Noise for his Doctorate. His soundtrack practice features music and sound designs for contemporary dance, theatre, installation, film, television and computer games. He has released over 20 albums of material internationally, traversing a range of styles, and performs his audiovisual live shows locally and internationally. He was the founder and curator of Dorobo records, which showcased Australian sound art for 15 years.
Industry experience:
In theatre, Darrin has worked with the Melbourne Theatre Company, Malthouse, Daniel Schlusser Ensemble, Chamber Made Opera, Bell Shakespeare, Sydney Theatre Company, Griffin and Finucane & Smith; in dance, with Chunky Move, Australian Dance Theatre, Expressions Dance Theatre, Lucy Guerin, Sue Healey and Antony Hamilton. As a founding member of the (((20hz))) Collective, his installations have fused sound with light, felt vibration and motion simulators, and have been exhibited at White Night, the National Gallery of Victoria, Experimenta, Globelight and RMIT Gallery.
Awards:
• Australian Academy of Cinema & Television Arts award finalist: Best Soundtrack (Boys in the Trees, Mushroom Pictures), 2016
• Australian Film Critics Circle award finalist: Best Soundtrack (Boys in the Trees, Mushroom Pictures), 2016
• APRA Art Music awards finalist for excellence in experimental music, 2015
• Green Room Best Sound Design/Soundtrack, Independent Theatre (M+M, Daniel Schlusser Ensemble), 2013
• Green Room Best Sound Design/Soundtrack, Independent Theatre (Poet #7, Daniel Schlusser Ensemble), 2010
• Green Room Best Sound Design/Soundtrack, Theatre (Memory of Water, Melbourne Theatre Company), 2005
• RMIT (DSC) Research award 2013
– For technical innovation
• RMIT Teaching Award 2012
– For excellence in ten years of teaching practice aligned with industry engagement in the field of sound design and composition
• 'Best Collateral Material' (silver) prize in the ANZ media awards (for Showtime Station idents) 2008
• Green Room nominations:
– Best Soundtrack/Sound Design Theatre (Meat Party, Malthouse) 2003
– Best Soundtrack/Sound Design Independent Theatre (Antidote, Melbourne Fringe) 2008
– Best Soundtrack/Sound Design Independent Theatre (Life is a Dream, Daniel Schlusser) 2010
– Best Soundtrack/Sound Design Theatre (The Birthday Party, Melbourne Theatre Company) 2010
• Soundtrack to 'Fine Line Terrain' (dir. Sue Healey) 2003
– Winner Napolidanza Italy, Reeldance Australia/New Zealand, Best Dance Film Ausdance
Supervisor projects
- Distributing synthesis across audience devices
- 12 Mar 2024
- Voiceworld: Exploring Vocal Ecology and Speech Synthesis through Practice
- 2 Oct 2023
- Designing Encounter
- 10 Dec 2021
- ECCOWARE: Music as Virtual Aesthetic Environment
- 25 May 2020
- Phantom Perspectives: Diffracting Sentient Encounters of Site, Space and Place Through an Experimental Field Recording Practice
- 14 Nov 2019
- From the Deterministic to the Emergent: Design strategies for Networked Audio-Visual Nodal Systems
- 21 Mar 2019
- Smartphonocentrism: The Voice as Detritus in Video Art
- 9 Jun 2017
- Unveiling the Umterweltoir: Framing natural environments to expose the looping nature of our listening to and feeling in them.
- 1 Mar 2017
- Auditory Countermeasures for Sleep Inertia
- 18 Jul 2016
- Site unseen: perception of place within contemporary sonic arts practices
- 26 Feb 2016
- Hypersonic Music: Determining New Musical Experiences in the Parametric Acoustic Array
- 3 Mar 2014
- A Dense Mass of Indecipherable Fear: The Experiential (Non)Narration of Trauma and Madness through Acousmatic Sound
- 1 Mar 2010
Teaching interests
Perception and cognition in multisensory experience: sound and light, sound and narrative, sound and movement/vibration - AkE Labs: www.rmit.edu.au/art/research/ake. Extreme music - from lowercase to noise, environmental vs musical sound, soundtrack and sound design
Research interests
Darrin Verhagen studies the neurobiology of aesthetic experience, with particular interest in the multisensory. This research is realised through both creative practice and real world problem-solving.
As a soundtrack composer, his research has previously focused on the sonic codes of cinema as well as the relationship between musical and environmental sound in relation to vision and narrative in theatre, dance, film, computer games, installation, jingles and earcons.
Darrin's academic background is in the psychophysiology of aesthetic experience. His Masters explored the delicate instability of lowercase music, his PhD the brutal assault of Noise. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Sound Design stream of Digital Media and the director of the Audiokientic Experiments (AkE) Lab.
AkE (pron. 'ache') is a multidisciplinary research laboratory using motion simulators and 4D cinema seating to explore the relationship between sound and movement, as well as sound, movement and vision. AkE features collaborations between composers, programmers, and designers, working to explore the perceptual and cognitive underpinnings of multisensory experience.
Collaborative installation projects from the lab, released as (((20hz))), have included "A Series of Small Wire Objects (Many of Them Uninteresting): Object One," Globelight Festival, 2014; "A Series of Small Wire Objects (Many of Them Uninteresting): Object 2," Experimenta Recharge: 6th Biennial of Media Art, RMIT Gallery, 2014; "Einsturzende Naubauten's Klangbewegungmaschine" (as part of Geniale Diletanten), RMIT Gallery, 2015; "blue|red: VIMS\SIMS," Morbis Artis, RMIT Gallery/White Night, 2016; and "line_array," City of Melbourne, 2017. An audiokinetic opera is currently in development for the Australia Council and an audiokinetic jukebox featuring the history of Berlin for the Goethe Institute.
Beyond an open-ended approach to artistic experimentation in multisensory experience, much of the new knowledge drawn from creative practice is then applied in real world contexts. Current projects include the activation of memory through physically embodied musical experience for Alzheimer's sufferers, and a collaboration with RMIT Engineering exploring the relationship between vibration, sound and drowsiness.
