Music Production graduate wins Romesh Dodangoda Award for immersive doomscrolling project

Music Production graduate Tom Greenaway-Parry has won this year’s Romesh Dodangoda Graduate Award for Excellence, for an immersive music experience that explores internet doomscrolling through sound, archive footage and vintage technology.

The award was presented by Grammy-nominated music producer Romesh Dodangoda, who recognised Tom’s creative approach to multimedia production and his ability to combine long-forgotten techniques with modern technology.

Tom, 26, from Whitchurch in Cardiff, graduated from USW with first-class honours in Music Producing, having previously studied Popular Music Technology at Coleg Gwent.

His project was inspired by The Disintegration Loops, a series of recordings by American composer William Basinski created from deteriorating tapes of his earlier music.

“The music sounded quite haunting, and I wanted to create something similar as an art installation,” said Tom. “I was also inspired by the writings of Mark Fisher, and his exploration of ‘hauntology’ and ‘lost futures’.

“As I developed the project, I became interested in the theory behind this type of music production and how it could be used to explore modern media consumption. I came across an old CRT television with a classic analogue display and used the sound from that as a backdrop for the concept of doomscrolling.

“The project evolved into a multimedia collage of different elements. I collected clips from the BBC archive and fed them into a programme that randomly selects and plays them, creating constantly changing combinations of sound and image.

“Through combining old and new technology, the project explores the effect that social media has on our understanding of history, our over-reliance on nostalgia and our inability to conjure new conceptions of the future.

“Our feeds can show us a funny cat video one minute and footage of a war-torn country the next. It can be incredibly disconcerting, but we've become used to it over time.

“I wanted to bring that experience into focus and encourage people to recognise just how strange it is. When we're constantly consuming content in this way, it can become easy to disengage, lose critical thinking and become numb to what we're seeing.”

Romesh, a fellow USW graduate who has worked with artists including Motörhead and Bring Me The Horizon, said: “Tom has really thought outside the box and created something quite unique. It’s a brilliantly thought-provoking project that uses technology in an unexpected way.

“He has built something that demonstrates how valuable music producing is and reflects the growing popularity of immersive experiences in live music venues.”

Rob Smith, Associate Professor of Music and Communities at USW, added: “Tom’s work is a very well thought-out and expertly executed project with the potential to develop in many different directions.

“This award recognises the originality of his idea and highlights the exciting possibilities for multimedia music production in the future.”