Daniel is a composer and digital media artist who was born in the Blue Mountains, just west of Sydney. He studied composition as well as music education at a number of universities including the University of New England, University of Griffith, University of Wollongong and the Australian Institute of Music and has a BMus (Hons), MMus and a MA(R)…

Daniel began lecturing in composition at the Australian Institute of Music in 1999, then, in 2004 as a lecturer in composition in the faculty of creative arts at the University of Wollongong…Further to his preoccupation with acousmatic, electroacoustic and audiovisual works, Daniel has written, performed and produced music in a variety of styles including music for film and television, music for jazz and rock ensembles, and electronic music…

Some of the international events Daniel’s work has been performed and exhibited at include:

ICMC, ACMC, FEMF15, Diffusion 2006, Biennale Music en Scene (GRAME), Unruly Music: Peck School of the Arts, BEAF, International Symposium of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, Empirical Soundings, InsideOut, Full Sail, Spark, Mantis: South-North with his works for video exhibited at: Festival Internacional de Vídeo y Artes Digitales, Spain, Cologne OFF II, Cologne, PI5 Video Festival – National Museum Szczecin/ Poland, 2nd Digital Art Festival, Rosario/Argentina, 8th CHROMA, Festival de Arte Audiovisual, Mexico, Victory Media Arts, Dallas, Carnival of e creativity and change and the IPFF…

In 2006 he was awarded 2nd prize at the diffusion 2006 international Electroacoustic composition competition, a joint award from the Centre for CMCM and RTE Lyric FM, Ireland

He was an artist in residence at the ‘Atlantic Centre for the Arts’- New Smyrna Beach, Florida. One of his works was selected as part of the Australian National Selection for inclusion at the ISCM-ACL, World Music Days Hong Kong, 2007. Two of his works were both preselected at the 33e Concours Internationaux de Musique et d’Art Sonore Electroacoustiques de Bourges…

And he received an honourable mention at the XXV Concorso Internazionale di Composizione Originale per Banda, Italia…

Daniel’s music has been published on a number of CD’s, including the ACMA 07 CD, ACMC 06 Conference Concert CD, Quiet Design Records ‘Resonance – Steel Pan in the 21st Century’ Compilation CD, Incidental Amplifications CD and Liquid Architecture 05 CD… As well as lecturing and composing Daniel is currently completing a Doctorate at the University of Wollongong…

Daniel also owns a restaurant called Red Squirrel in the seaside suburb of Coogee, in Sydney, Australia…When in Sydney you’re always welcome…(forgive the shameless promo…!)

please visit Daniel Blinkhorn’s book of sand web page with more samples. This page was designed by Leonardo Solaas from Argentina and Metropolis highly recommend a visit as well.

descent with modification

The title of the work refers to adaptive radiation, a term indicating the rapid evolution of a single ancestral organism into numerous other organisms that are each adaptively specialized to occupy particular environmental conditions…

A duality exists in the piece at the intersection of the figurative, where transitory images of sonic miscellany coalesce, and the literal, where the sound transformations function as distilled narrative, combining the physical and gestural characteristics of performance into a series of primal soundscapes, all of which depict the adaptation from one ecological niche to another…

Through transformations applied to recordings of physical gestures generating fret squeaks and clicks on the classical guitar, I have sought to create a work that, on the one hand captures the torque click of the machine head, the buzz of wound strings on brass frets, droplets of sweat on the tips of fingers and the squeal and chirp of friction, whilst simultaneously occupying a larger framework encompassing ecological diversity; from the single sound to a rapid divergence of highly specialized sonic environments, as in descent with modification…

Daniel Blinkhorn, 2007