Joseph Callaly​​

Contact

​joseph.callaly[at]monash.edu
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My research focuses on listening infrastructures and the ways hearing is shaped across technical systems, embodied experience, and everyday environments.

RESEARCH

Publications
Callaly, J. (2026). ‘Hearing Différances: The Tinnital Self through the Lens of Barad’. in Diffractions: Karen Barad and Music Studies, Edinburgh Univeristy Press, Resonances: Critical Engagements with Music and Philosophy.

Callaly, J. (2026). ‘An Economics of Audibility: Measuring Urban Ear-Time and Sonic Citizenship over 24 Hours’. Seismograf Peer.

Callaly, J. (2026). ‘Replaying an Imagined Past: Adoptive Fictioning and the Counter-Archives of Aloïse and Walshe’. Performance Research. (In review).

Callaly, J. (2026). ‘Platform audibility: How recommender algorithms teach us to listen through experiments and valuation’. New Media & Society. (In review).

Callaly, J. (2026). ‘Dead labour, virtual ghosts:Real-money trading and financialised agencies in Old School RuneScape’s Revenant Caves’. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. (In review).

Callaly, J. (2025). ‘On Transversal Creativities: Figures of a Sonic and Machinic Apparatus’. PhD thesis. Monash University.

Talks

Callaly, J. (2026). ‘Platform Audibility, AI, and Fairness in Music Recommendation’, at 24th  Annual Science, Technology & Society (STS) Conference Graz, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria. (Forthcoming).

Callaly, J. (2026). ‘Music Recommender Systems as a Cultural Mode of Listening’, at 19th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology, Durham University, Durham, UK. (Forthcoming).

Callaly, J. (2025). ‘Baradian Perspectives onTinnitus and Diffractive Research Methodology’, at Diffractions: An International Symposium on Barad and Music Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

Callaly, J. (2025). ‘Improvisation as Concept-Creation in Practice Research’, at Australian Jazz and Improvisation Research Network Conference 8, Waipapa Taumata Rau/University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.

Callaly, J. (2026). ‘Phantom Listening: Tinnitus and Sonic World-Making’, SoMP Research Seminar Series, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Callaly, J (2025). ‘The Studio as Instrument’, Composition & Music Technology Creative Practices Series, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
ARTWORKS

2025     Patterns of Self-organisation (in Swarms)
Multi-channel audio installation, funded by Design and Sonic Practice Research Group Commission. The Swarms project was originally composed in 24-channel sound for the RMIT Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory. It has since been presented at RMIT's Black Box Gallery (2021), Miscellania for ONO (2022), and Storey Hall for the Canadian Electroacoustic Community Jeu de Temps (2022). ​In 2025, the Swarms project was performed at the Melbourne Recital Centre, for SIAL's Immersive Sonic Journeys.
2020     Deloop
Digital musical game funded by City of Melbourne. Deloop is a musical toy designed to introduce the user to two musical concepts which fall outside the domain of traditional Western-focused music education. These two concepts are 1) non-traditional tuning systems, and 2) cyclical rhythmic structures. In this iteration, the user can switch between five non-equal temperament tuning systems. The piece was designed as part of a exegetical body of research into an interpretation of post-digital creativity within music education.
2019     Empat Blok
Interactive Multimedia Installation at ​E-Gallery, Kuala Lumpur​. Created in collaboration with Mike Hoo, Trent Borchard and Theodore Hassan, as part of a collaboration between RMIT and Multimedia University, Malaysia. The piece explores the perception of wealth inequality through projection mapped visuals and audio. Using infrared cameras, the viewers position in the room is detected and used to control the sound and vision, with different depictions presented to them as they move through the space. The sound was created by real-time mapping the coordinates of the viewer to parameters of a live cycling audio session, with the moods and timbres shifting in correspondence with the viewer's movements.
2018     Oversetter
Performance for computer-controlled grand organ and electronics at Melbourne Town Hall​. The project was inspired by the ‘talking piano’ which uses Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) to emulate the sound of human speech using only an acoustic piano. FFTs were used to make the grand organ reproduce the sound of a digital input signal, which was improvised in real-time using a hardware modular audio system. Oversetter aims to reimagine the means of connection between performer and instrument.
2018     SFFFB
Multi-channel sound installation for RMIT's Black Box Gallery. SFFFB (Spatial Fast Fixed Frequency Filter-Bank) comprises a suite of studies and one creative work designed to examine various concepts which are each realised through the use of custom software designed to distribute an audio spectrum spatially. The conceptual thread through the studies is the relating of audio frequency to spatiality and movement. The software itself was designed in Max/MSP using a network of band-pass filters which direct different frequencies to different points around an eight-channel octagonal array; multiple versions of the program were created based on the requirements of individual studies.
2018     Pan-Alcidae
Ambisonic performance at the Spatial Informational Architecture Laboratory, RMIT, Melbourne​. Custom software was developed in Max/MSP for the Pan-Alcidae project - white noise is splintered into 50 constituent frequency bands - the locations of which are determined by the simulation of a flock of 50 birds. Each band moves dynamically around the virtual listener, being represented locationally by a single bird of the flock.
2017      Tone Field
Ambisonic performance at the Spatial Informational Architecture Laboratory, RMIT, Melbourne​. Performer controls the position of a virtual listener, navigating through a field of stationary tones.