Institute of Art Design + Technology
Dún Laoghaire

Aran Hopkinson 

BA [Hons] Creative Music Production

I am an electronic music producer, who’s creative interests lie in blending ambient music and sounds of nature with dance music-inspired rhythms. My production process focuses on synthesis, sound design and sampling in pursuit of making textural electronic compositions.

Expectation Summit

'Expectation Summit' is an audiovisual composition designed for art exhibition spaces. The piece was made in collaboration with digital artist Karis Hopkinson, who produced the visual content for the project.
The aims of the project were to marry sound with image in a way that supports or enhances themes or concepts present in the digital artwork. Expectation Summit aims to elude the spectators expectation through its unpredictable sequences, incoporating insipiration from abstracted daily observations, themes of dislocation and dysfunction, conflict and harmony, anxiety and tension.
The audio approach to the project aims to juxtapose sounds of organic location-based recordings against highly synthetic timbres in pursuit of referencing life in a contemporary landscape.



'An enquiry into the use of sound design and compositional techniques to support visual concepts in contemporary digital art'

This research project explores the marriage of sound and visuals through the lens of installation based audio-visual art. This project titled ‘Expectation Summit’ was produced in collaboration with Karis Hopkinson, a visual artist whose work manifests as an enquiry into what it means to live, consume, and observe in this contemporary landscape. This research focuses on the audio aspect of the collaboration and aims to determine how best to creatively aid in supporting the visual themes and concepts present in the artwork through sound. These include themes of environment and location, feeling, physical material and texture. It is of the essence to this collaboration to convey specific aspects of the artists intentions for the work into the score while including interpretation of the visuals via sound to add further subtext to the imagery. The stylistic approach to the audio for this project aims to blend elements of electronic musical composition and ambiguous film-score inspired foley and sound design in pursuit of an immersive sonic accompaniment. The project references the audio techniques of both music and film production with the aim of building a soundtrack that incorporates musicality and conveys artistic themes without the direct use of a traditionally structured musical arrangement. In reference to the project title, the score for this project aims to embrace the unpredictable and kaleidoscopic nature of the visual content by eluding the viewer’s expectation.