Dublin Sound Lab Announces New Associate Artists Scheme 2025
Pictured: Pauric Freeman, David Coonan and Barbara Elison.
Dublin Sound Lab has announced a new Associate Artist scheme beginning in 2025. In this first round three composers – David Coonan, Barbara Elison and Pauric Freeman – have been invited to work alongside the DSL team to develop new creative initiatives over an extended period.
These collaborations may result in new works, commissions, performances, research activities or some other creative outcome. There is no upper or lower time range for the scheme, but it expected that the artists will have regular contact over at least two years.
Dublin Sound Lab is not an ensemble in the conventional sense with a fixed instrumental lineup. Instead, the group has a flexible structure and uses the term "new music project group" to describe their goal of creating new project-based collaborative activities. DSL's new Associate Artist initiative is one way to formalise these goals and make their projects more accessible to a wider range of artists who can use Dublin Sound Lab as a kind of creative laboratory. The Associate Artist scheme will be an ongoing initiative, and will be led by the participating artists themselves. The scheme will continue in parallel with, and complementary to, DSL's current commissioning schemes.
A formal "call for proposals" for future Associate Artists will be announced in early 2026. In the meantime Dublin Sound Lab are always glad to hear from composers, musicians, music technologists and artists working in any medium. Visit www.dublinsoundlab.ie to find out more and get in touch.
Dublin Sound Lab is supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
About the Artists
David Coonan
David Coonan is a composer and multidisciplinary artist whose work spans theatre, dance, film, and visual art. His opera commissions for Irish National Opera, created with Carys D. Coburn, include verballing (part of 20 Shots of Opera, 2020) and Horse Ape Bird, a youth opera co-commissioned with Music Generation, the first for both organisations. Other major projects include Dēmos, a large-scale dance and music work with Liz Roche, commissioned by Dublin Dance Festival and the Abbey Theatre with New Music Dublin, for Liz Roche Company and Crash Ensemble (2021), and Furtive Tears, Salomé’s Lament, a collaboration with visual artist Niamh McCann’s at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (2018/19).
His concert works — for solo, chamber, orchestral, vocal, and choral forces — have been commissioned or performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Crash Ensemble, London Sinfonietta, Chamber Choir Ireland, EXAUDI, the Choir of the Chapels Royal HM Tower of London, and others, under conductors including François-Xavier Roth, Pierre-André Valade, and Elgar Howarth.
Barbara Elison
Barbara Ellison is an award-winning composer whose work explores ghostly presence and substance in a plethora of sonic and visual realms. Her creations have been presented internationally in live performances, installations and audio releases, including her album CyberSongs (Unsounds Records) and 3-hour album, Cyber-Opera- a trans-human opera in three acts.
She is known for her ongoing body of compositional work ‘Sonic Phantoms’ within which she has developed a syncretic approach that encompasses and coalesces all kinds of sources, materials, techniques and creative tools: from exploring and performing with the sonic intricacies of amplified objects (Drawing Phantoms) and instruments (Instrumental Phantoms), creating voice avatars with trans-human capabilities (Vocal Phantoms), creating ‘Phantom Portraits’ or carrying out field expeditions from diverse environments such as the Arctic, the Himalayas, South Africa or the Amazonian rainforest (Natural Phantoms).
She performs internationally with her own solo work and active in The Netherlands for several years culminating with an epic theatrical premiere of CyberSongs featuring Ensemble Klang and Nathalie Smoor for the Musical Utopias festival 2023 (Korzo, The Hague). Her music has been reviewed widely and recently featured on radio programmes and platforms such as BBC’s ‘Late Junction,The Moderns, Radio Gwen, SilenceAndSound, Freies Radio Neumünster, totallyradio, SoundProjector, felthat, Dublin Digital Radio, Touching Extremes etc.
She has a PhD from the University of Huddersfield, UK (‘Sonic Phantoms’) and co-ordinates and co-produces the Sonic Mmabolela artists residency and workshop with Francisco López, in South Africa (2013-2019).
Pauric Freeman
Pauric Freeman is a multidisciplinary artist based in Ireland, working across audiovisual performance, generative video, and sound. His practice explores translation, using data collected from live instruments as the basis for real-time audiovisual compositions. Moving beyond representation, his work examines how one system of meaning can be distorted or expanded through another.
His sound is constructed from dense chords and shifting rhythmic structures, arising from systems of pattern and process. Fragments of electronic music are reworked into evolving forms, echoing ambient, techno, and noise while moving beyond all three.
His recent project Structures (2024), funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, explores shifting relationships between sound and image through live performance. His work has been presented across Ireland, Europe, North America, and Australia, with recent performances at ADE Festival, Amsterdam (2024), and Goldsmiths, London (2025).