Goldsmiths, University of London

Faculty Member, Music

Senior Lecturer, Head of the Unit for Sound Practice Research

About

Operating across sonic arts,  experimental music, sound poetry, architecture, acoustics, anthropology, sociology, cultural geography, documentary film, live-art and soundscape studies, Drever’s theoretical and practice-based research demonstrates an ongoing inquiry into the affect, perception and practice of everyday environmental sound and human utterance. Projects are often derived from extensive fieldwork in particular soundwalking and field recording, the most recent of which explores the crowd sounds of Hong Kong, Ochlophonics Hong Kong (2001-2010). He is currently undertaking an environmental noise study of public toilets and the impact of 'ecological' hand dryers on accessibility.


Fundamentally, much of Drever’s work is collaborative, including projects with Rachel Gomme, Alice Oswald, Alaric Sumner, Tony Thatcher, Tony Whitehead (RSPB) and Louise K. Wilson. He is a member of Blind Ditch and has worked on many projects with poet, Lawrence Upton. Commissions range from the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (1999), Arts Council England (2002 & 2007), to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (2002). His work has twice been awarded a prize in the annual Musica Nova competition, Prague (1997 & 1998). He has discussed his research on BBC Radio 3’s Here and Now and BBC World Service’s Discovery.

Drever has been lecturing in and around the Electronic Music Studios (EMS) at Goldsmiths since 2003. He studied Music at the University of Wales, Bangor (1992-95), followed by an MMus study in Electroacoustic Music Composition at the University of East Anglia (1995-6). In 2001 he was awarded a PhD from Dartington College of Arts, for a programme of research titled 'Phonographies: Practical and Theoretical Explorations into Composing with Disembodied Sound'. Following his PhD he co-coordinated Sounding Dartmoor, a participative soundscape study of Dartmoor National Park (2000-2) for the Digital Crowd (University of Plymouth). During 2003-04 he was an ACE/AHRB Arts and Science Research Fellow with Centre for Computational Creativity, City University exploring ‘electronic music performance interfaces that learn from their users’.

Before taking up his post at Goldsmiths, Drever was an associate lecturer for City University (London), Dartington College of Arts, Exeter University and the University of Plymouth, lecturing in Music, Media Arts, Media Lab Arts and Visual Arts. During the autumn semester of 2007 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Critical Intermedia Laboratory, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.

An elected director of Sonic Arts Network since 2004, Drever became its final chair in 2008. He is also co-founder (1998) and currently chair of the UK and Ireland Soundscape Community (a regional affiliate of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology) for whom he chaired Sound Practice: the 1st UKISC Conference on sound, culture and environments in 2001 at Dartington and Sound Practice 2006 at Goldsmiths. He has also been actively involved in the Noise Futures Network (EPSRC).

Drever is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, 2009-12, a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (FSRA) and
Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (FRGS).