I’ve just wrapped up five training sessions for around 130 tutors (small group teachers) across the College of Systems and Society: two full-day sessions for new starters and three two-hour refresher sessions for returning tutors (and there’s one extra session to come for late-comers). It’s an exhausting but rewarding process. I’ve now been reflecting on our tutor’s needs and how we can activate their knowledge and experience to provide a better student experience across our College.

In June 2025, I hosted the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference at ANU in Canberra, and served as a general chair along with Pia van Gelder from the ANU School of Art and Design. In this post I want to talk a bit about the kind of conference we produced, discuss (brag about) what we achieved and thank everybody who contributed. Along the way, I have images from a few conference highlights.

I had an amazing weekend performing at SoundOut 2026 at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery performing with some incredible Australian and international musicians. SoundOut is described as “one of the gateway exploratory music-art events in Australia” and a gem in Canberra’s yearly music schedule.

The first of our smcclablive concerts was held at the Peter Karmel Building Big Band Room on 7 November 2025. Works were presented from researchers and students in the ANU SMCClab with guests Charlie Roberts from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (USA) and Ben Swift from the ANU School of Cybernetics.

Andromeda is Coming, the exploratory music project of (me!) Charles Martin and Alec Hunter recently developed a concert of new works all featuring research into intelligent (or AI-enabled) musical instruments. Incorporating new perspectives in our work, we invited two members of my ANU SMCClab research lab, Yichen Wang and Sandy Ma to join us for a 60-minute concert of live audio-visual performances.

I’ve recently been thinking about projects my lab has been working on and how to focus our work in future to take advantage of collaboration and knowledge-sharing within my group.