Nicole Carroll is a composer, performer, sound designer, and builder working with audio, video, and tangible objects. Her work spans installation, improvisation, and fixed media performance, across noise, soundscape, and acousmatic genres. She is active as a sound designer and composer in theatre, performs electronic music under the alias “n0izmkr,” and builds custom synthesisers, controllers, and performance sensor systems. Her research focuses on generative systems that merge analog and digital technologies to create musical performance systems from non-musical sources. Additional interests include soft circuits and wearable sensors, augmented acoustic instruments, and AV synthesis on mobile devices and embedded systems. 

Themes found in Nicole’s work derive from reflections on nature, occult philosophies, literature, and the human psyche. Inspired by divination folklore, chance procedures, and hermetic occult philosophies, she uses the tarot and W.B. Yeats’ esoteric system detailed in A Vision as conceptual and mapping frameworks in her music. Yeats’ system of moon phases and their correspondences are combined with chance procedures, which are driven by tarot card symbolism and numerology, to determine form, texture, rhythmic relationships, and processing parameters during performance.

Nicole’s works have been performed internationally in USA, Mexico, Wales, Germany, Greece, Australia, and China, including at SEAMUS, ICMC, and NIME conferences. Nicole holds an M.M. and B.M. in Composition from Bowling Green State University and Arkansas State University, respectively. During the 2017-18 academic year, she was an Adjunct Research Fellow at QCGU in Brisbane, Australia. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Music and Multimedia from Brown University in Providence, RI, USA and is currently Lecturer in Digital Composition at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

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