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Headshot of Louise Barnell

louise barnell

Role

Lou Barnell teaches on the BA Music Performance programme. She leads the first-year songwriting module, which explores the fundamentals of songwriting and music theory through practical composition and reflection using genre conventions and techniques. She also leads on DAW skills, helping students develop their ability to use music software to create and record their own work.

Research areas

Lou Barnell’s work is rooted in her ongoing research into 'Live Dreaming', which began in 2019 with DYCP funding from Arts Council England. Through this, she developed an immersive performance methodology characterised by intense sensory experimentation and the transformation of matter. She is currently supported by an M4C-funded practice-led PhD at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and the University of Birmingham.

Her research explores musical performance and dreaming as parallel functions that support regulation and wayfinding. She investigates how alienated and marginalised bodies might reorient themselves through entangled webs of technology, dreams, and matter within musical performance. Lou’s approach to music-making is squishy, visceral, and immersive — what she terms ‘Neuroqueer Radical Musicking’ (Walker 2021, Small 2011). Influenced by Pauline Oliveros’ concept of Deep Listening (1975), she reimagines the body as a mirror, reflecting and refracting the parallel states of dreaming and performing through shapeshifting, sculpted reusable materials and immersive audience experiences.

Find more information about Lou's research.

External activity

Lou is an award-winning vocalist, sound and performance artist, one of Sound and Music's New Voices 2022 Composers, and one of Manchester Jazz Festival's Hothouse Residents 2023.

She was the winner of the 2021 Oram Awards, supported by The PRS Foundation and BBC Radiophonic Institute in recognition of innovation in sound and technology. Her music communicates synaesthetic experience of sound, hyperfocus and sensory overload as a neurodivergent woman. She creates constellations of materials, wearable music technology, voice and movement.

Lou's works have been released on labels including Accidental Records, The Lumen Lake, Pearlhome Records, Doitthissen Records, Earlid, Linear Obsessional Records, and The Women Composers Collective. Her music has received airplay on NTS Radio, BBC Radio 6 (Stuart Maconie's Freakzone), Resonance FM, Soho Radio, Supersonic Podcast, BBC Radio 3 (Corey Mwamba's Freeness and Elizabeth Alker's Unclassified), BBC Merseyside, Resonance FM (Bad Punk Radio), and Resonance Extra.

Her composition commissions include MODRO ČRNILO / BLUE INK, created in collaboration with choreographer Enya Belak, which toured across Europe with Plesni Teater (Slovenia), Croatian Cultural Center & Port of Dance (Croatia), Kunstraum Nestroyhof, Tanzhafen & Tanzhäuser Festivals (Austria), and Black Box Festival (Bulgaria). Another major commission, THE ARTIST, toured the UK with Filskit Theatre and New Theatre Royal. Her multimedia composition FRAU LEHMANN, incorporating Twitter as a platform, premiered at Yarmonics Festival in 2020.

She premiered her ‘Live Dreaming’ piece COMFORT ME OFTEN at the FIX 21 Biennale in Belfast, later performing it at the 2021 Oram Awards Ceremony at Supersonic Festival. Her work TERRESTRIAL CIRCUITS was exhibited at the MUSLAB International Exhibition of Electroacoustic Music in Mexico.

Lou has performed at a wide range of venues and festivals including Supernormal Festival, IKLECTIKA Festival, Supersonic Festival, Manchester Jazz Festival Industry Showcase, the Royal Academy of Arts, Café Oto, APT Gallery, the Freud Museum, and Bloomsbury Festival alongside Luke Jerram’s moon installation. She has also held a residency at St Augustine's Tower in Hackney with Breathing Space Collective.

Other selected performances include Accidental Theatre (Belfast), Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin (Derry), Romantso (Athens), Vrooom (Rotterdam), University of Tübingen (Germany), Sonorities Festival (Belfast), University of Jyväskylä (Finland), the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), the Festival of Performing Arts (Oxford Brookes), and Other Worlds Festival (Blackpool).

Further information:

Sponsors and collaborators

Lou collaborates with artist Anna Homler and is a a vocalist with Emergence Collective – an improvised process music ensemble LMB, a sound and movement project with composer Lisa Busby. She is also a member of Breathing Space Collective.

Course(s) I teach on