artist
Natasha Barrett
UK / Norway
Natasha Barrett is a composer, new media artist, and researcher. She creates acousmatic, electronic, and live-electroacoustic music, public-space sound installations, and audiovisual works. She is widely recognised for her artistic exploration of 3D sound and ambisonics. Her work is commissioned and performed worldwide and she has received awards and first prizes in over 30 international competitions, including the most prestigious prize available for Nordic composers, the Nordic Council Music Prize.
In addition to her solo career, she regularly collaborates with performers, visual artists, architects, and scientists, often drawing on data emulating or created by real-world processes as a source for artistic exploration. Some of the highlights include 3D audiovisual artworks with the USA-based OpenEndedGroup, science-art sonification in collaboration with geoscientists, and live electronics collaborations with many soloists and ensembles.
Barrett lives and works in Norway.
Natasha Barrett
Talking Trees: A Nature-Responsive Grove, 2025
Four loudspeakers, motion sensors, microphone, Raspberry Pi, MaxMSP RBNO.
This sound installation captures sounds created by wind and nearby voices in the Alby forest and its shoreline, to create a real-time composition. Enhanced natural sounds reveal often-overlooked qualities: swaying trees, creaking branches, falling rain, and distant tidal rhythms. These subtle, often unheard elements blend with the existing soundscape, acknowledging visitors who wish to become part of the system.
Nestled among the trees, motion sensors and a concealed microphone capture the forest’s gentle hum, transforming it into a living composition. As gusts intensify, the forest awakens in a chorus of creaking wood and fluttering leaves.
To experience the installation, enter the grove. Speak kind words to be included sonically; your words will soon vanish. Or remain silent and immerse yourself in the surroundings. Within and between worlds, Barrett’s work resonates with a liminal ecology, bridging sensuous realms in a sonorous exchange of playful transition, immersion, and renewed perception.
