Brighton PhD student wins Ivor Novello Award

Olivia, who studied for her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Digital Music and Sound Arts (DMSA), was presented the award at an event hosted by Radio 3’s Tom Service and Hannah Peel at the BFI Southbank in London.

The Ivors Classical Awards recognise creative excellence in British and Irish composing for classical and sound art.

Olivia says winning was a thrilling experience. She said: “When I heard my name, the emotion was overwhelming, I did everything I could to remain collected and walked on stage for my acceptance speech, and then it was a bit of an out-of-body experience, you see yourself and all these people looking at you, it is very weird. Then you are ushered to the back – still shaking - for photos and a video interview.”

Olivia Louvel winning the Best Sound Art The Ivors Classical Awards 2023, Photo Hogan Media Shutterstock

LOL by Olivia Louvel, photo by Rachel Deakin

Her winning piece, LOL, is described as a site-specific sonic intervention reflecting the current state of political affairs in Britain. It was broadcast via the public address system of Middlesbrough’s CCTV surveillance network as part of the town’s Art Week in September 2022. During the work passers-by heard political slogans, and news headlines read by an AI voice ‘Kate.’ The piece was produced in collaboration with Kersten Glandien, artistic director of Sound Art Brighton and commissioned by The Auxiliary. The Art Week, titled POWER questioned how official power is wielded and how unofficial power is expressed.

Olivia said that making the work was an experience in itself: “Working with a citywide Public Address System was a rare experience and a unique opportunity as a sound artist.”

Of her course, she said: “I am indebted to the DMSA, when I joined the course, I was a digital musician making video art…but the field of Sound Art was still quite mysterious to me. The DMSA course impacted profoundly my practice, I began developing sound art installations with miniature speakers. Subsequently, I developed two sound art installations with Visaton speakers,’ The Whole Inside’ (2019) and ‘Doggerland Channels’ (2022, 2023).

“Now with my PhD as my research is spanned across the Fine Art and Digital Music and Sound Art (DMSA) departments, I extend my wings and certainly benefit from this cross-disciplinary approach, environment, and broad doctoral supervision.”

DMSA course leader Johanna Bramli said that the whole team was incredibly proud of Olivia’s achievement: “Olivia has remained, throughout her time here, an amazing creative force with a singular vision and profound understanding of sound art. She has been an inspiration to us and her fellow students. The DMSA team offers her massive congratulations on the award.”

Since graduating in 2020, Olivia has exhibited at The Hepworth Wakefield and Towner Galleries with her work on Barbara Hepworth as well as being awarded a research grant by the Henry Moore Foundation last year.

This week sees the release of Olivia’s new album ‘doggerLANDscape,’ which is accompanied by a video art on Doggerland, the land that used to stretch between today’s coast of Britain and Europe. She explained: “Around 8,000 years ago, the river Thames was then connected to the Rhine, and so we were not always an island. In the next months, I will carry on editing the voices I recorded this year in Lukas Kühne’s sound sculpture in remote Iceland, as this forms one key aspect of my research as a doctoral student. And I am sketching ideas for a future new sound art installation.”