Contact: hello@duncanspeakman.net

Duncan Speakman is a composer and sound artist based at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. He creates narrative sound led experiences that engage audiences in uncontrolled public and private space. He regularly creates bespoke work internationally including installations on trains in Guangzhou, loudspeaker symphonies in New Zealand, audio walks in Saitama, and sound installations in Porto; he has also recently developed a number of hybrid print/digital experiments. From 2010 - 2015 he was co-director of the artists collective Circumstance with Sarah Anderson, Emilie Grenier and Tom Abba.

His recent audio augmented reality project ‘Only Expansion’ won Best Immersive/XR experience at London Film Festival and the Special Jury award for Immersive Non-fiction at International Documentary Festival Amsterdam.

In 2021 he completed his PhD Composing Entanglement - Temporal Structure of Audio Augmented Reality". From 2022 - 2024 he lead the MA Immersive Storytelling at Royal Holloway London and the MA Virtual and Extended Realities at UWE Bristol. He is currently a senior researcher at University of Bristol working on the role of sound in future studies.

He has delivered keynotes and papers at MIT Open Documentary Lab, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Royal Geographic Society, SXSW, Antwerp Research Institute, Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, Design Institute Hong Kong and more.

He currently offers bespoke sound design/soundtracks and consultancy. Please see here for current projects/workshops available for booking.

  • The musical score by Duncan Speakman causes fissures in time; it jarringly skips ahead, stretches back decades, and the future hurries to arrive. - Gareth Llŷr Evans, The Guardian
  • Winner - International Documentary Festival Amsterdam - Special Jury Award for Immersive Non-fiction - “It is quite an ambitious endeavor to merge geology, modern city life, climate change, and the urban landscape in the middle of Amsterdam, but with a specially crafted audio system that mixes pre-recorded sound as well as augmented real time audio, it can be done. This creator proved it in a highly sensorial and poetic way with a project that not only makes you aware of the world around you, but also triggers the emotional chords within.” - IDFA Jury report

  • Work that makes you feel joyous and sad at once. Its trace haunts the memory like a beautiful echo. – Toby Smith, Director, Salisbury Festival

  • I have experienced Circumstance as a commissioner, collaborator and audience member and every interaction has been genuinely rewarding. Their work is always high quality, they continually seek to create new cultural forms and explore new means of expression and they take incredible care to look after their audiences. Track them down and work with them now. – Clare Reddington, CEO, Watershed, Bristol

  • some of the smartest, most arresting interpretations of narrative in a pervasively networked world. Whether working with location, audio, video or paper, the work is intelligent, playful, beautiful and irresistible – George Walkley, Head of Digital, Hachette UK
  • Simple everyday actions take on new meaning as tableaux merge and intertwine within the carefully choreographed constellations of moments – Dazed and Confused
  • The works in Porto touched my relation with the city and particular places in a very subtle but luminous and lasting way. Their very unique personal warmth and social reach still get hold of me sometimes when I walk those same paths
    – Pedro Rocha, Serravles Museum, Porto
  • a beautiful and otherworldly quality – The Guardian
  • A Folded Path is a truly immersive experience for everyone that encounters it allowing familiar places to be reimagined through a series of wanderings filled with the most beautiful sounds. It’s one of the most magical works we’ve had the pleasure of commissioning – Lisa Meyer, Creative Director, Supersonic Festival, Birmingham
  • I don’t really know this city, or I didn’t realize I was living in it, until Circumstance provided a brand new angle with their breathtaking city soundtrack. Stories coming from those hidden corners, familiar scenes of everyday life are all brought to the present when you are listening to this beautiful piece. A tear or a smile, will remain on your face while all the cells of your body are awakened, after being asleep for decades. – Veronica Wong, Curator, Times Museum, Guangzhou

  • Whilst tending to recoil from the phrase ‘game changing’, Circumstance make me want to say it. The experiences they put into the world are unlike anything else and for that reason are impossible to shovel neatly into a genre. The work is beautiful, moving, attentive, generous, melancholy, personal and profound. – Kate Yedigaroff, Director, MAYK/Mayfest

  • The unexpected experience offered feels like a real life filmic experience that masterfully sets the stage for your own imagination to discover the unseen poetry in everyday life. – Eva de Groot, Timelab, Ghent

  • slipped into the city of my memories.. ghostly promises brush against me.I am in tears – Realtime Arts
  • A personal invitation to a public experience, the strength of the work is in the juxtaposition of a new layer of story with a familiar city landscape – the barriers between these two can be invisible but generate a subtle difference in your relationship with your surroundings. – Mark Leaver, Development Director, Playable City
  • It was true augmented reality, and I want to take my friends and loved ones back there with me. It hurts that I can’t. But that’s kind of what being is, isn’t it? – Hannah Nicklin
  • Everything that was said seemed to predict what was going to happen, as if the street suddenly became the scene of a theatre that was directly responding to the soundtrack. Above all, the inexplicably intense sensation of belonging to the street, of being here and now in the city. – Olivier Ruellet

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