This is the website of Camille Robinson. I’m a musician, sonic artist, researcher, and educator based in Melbourne, Australia.

I have a diverse creative practice, and make instrumental music, songs, sound art, and sound design, independently and to commission for clients in film, theatre, dance, and museums. My work is informed by punk, jazz, electronic, and avant-garde musics, acoustic ecology, musique concrete, deep listening, and conceptual art.

The bulk of my research so far investigates the ability of sonic artworks to interrogate, and encourage listeners to critically engage with the act of listening. My PhD project Listening Art: making sonic artworks that critique listening, proposed that to trigger critical reflection on auditory perception, sonic art must simultaneously elicit multiple contradictory forms of listening in its listeners. I also have a general research interest in innovation in the sonic arts (my Honours project was on early innovators in Australian experimental sonic art, with a dissertation on sound collage pioneer Jack Ellitt), and art-as-research.

I am currently Program Coordinator of the Industry Awareness stream at Collarts, lead the teaching team for the core unit Critical Thinking, and also teach units on experimental music practice, interactive media design, songwriting, music history, and music theory.

That’s me now. For a bit more backstory:

I was born in 1980, named after Camille Pissarro and Camille Saint-Saens (in case you were wondering about the unusual name). I had the benefit of growing up observing my parents’ experiences and work in the worlds of animation and academia, with glimpses of film & TV via my uncle (a sound recordist for the ABC), and the art world via family friend Icilio Martich-Severi.

My own creative career began in my teens, learning guitar from Elliott Folvig, Geoff Hughes, and Alain Valodze, and in 1997 I got my first gig, taking over as vocalist in my mates’ post-punk band No Avail.

I studied guitar at NMIT in 2001-02, with Jack Pantazis and Tom Fryer – who accidentally turned me into a composer by getting me to learn Olivier Messiaen’s Quatour pour le fin du temps (seriously, that piece changed my life).

2003-06 I played in cover bands and original projects (Ortonomy, Tang, The Robinson Family Singers) for a few years, taught privately, and worked in health and corporate admin. I dabbled in political cartooning for Arena Magazine, studied arranging with Australian showbiz veteran Joe Paparone, and when I figured out I was more a composer than a guitarist, auditioned for uni.

2007-10 I studied composition at the VCA (with Mark Pollard, Johanna Selleck, Elliott Gyger, Anthony Lyons, Andrian Pertout, John McCaughey, David Young), became a parent (!), stumbled back into the rock and roll game for a couple of years (with The Morrisons), discovered I had a knack for research and writing with my Honours project on Jack Ellitt, and got my first taste of tertiary teaching, running a music performance elective for medicine students at Monash University.

2011-15 I worked on my PhD supervised by Roger Alsop and Rob Vincs, began exhibiting and performing as a sound artist, and tutoring and teaching at the University of Melbourne, RMIT, Melbourne Polytechnic, and Collarts.

And that brings us back to the present day.

If you’d like to get in touch, drop me a line via the Contact page.