Rachel Meyers is a composer and environmental sound artist whose practice bridges the threshold between human and oceanic worlds. She develops music compositions that challenge us to listen differently and seeks to move beyond representational approaches toward embodied engagement with oceanic environments, while acknowledging the persistent challenges of technological mediation and infrastructural limitation.

Her work has been commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Ten Days on the Island, Liquid Architecture, and Next Wave Festival. As co-founder of Submergency, an arts-science collective exploring the Great Southern Reef alongside marine scientist Emily Sheppard and Trawlwoolway artist Dr Mandy Quadrio, Rachel pioneers collaborative approaches to climate communication through music.

Growing up as the daughter of a climate oceanographer who spent his career documenting what was happening with our oceans, Rachel witnessed firsthand how the communication of scientific data alone is not equipped to shift public consciousness. This shaped her conviction that music works through a different kind of intelligence: one that relates not to rational argument, but to embodied experience. Her compositions create spaces where audiences encounter creatures they've never met, where concert halls become ocean floors, where listening itself becomes an act of care.

Rachel is nearing completion of her PhD at the University of Tasmania, "Southern Ecophony: Towards an Aqueous Compositional Practice," investigating how sustained place-based oceanic engagement contributes to compositional transformation, documenting correlations between three years of cold-water swimming and innovations that differ systematically from earlier observational approaches. Her peer-reviewed research has been published in Fusion Journal and The Polar Journal.

Selected for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's Cybec 21st Century Australian Composers' Program (2024-2025), Rachel has performed at major Australian festivals including MONA FOMA, Four Winds, Dark MOFO, and the National Folk Festival. She is a founding member of Van Diemen's Fiddles and an Associate Artist with the Australian Music Centre.

Based in Lutruwita/Tasmania, Rachel maintains a creative practice rooted in accountability to place: by swimming at the same beach and returning to the same location for years, she accumulates seasonal knowledge and aspires towards compositional approaches that attempt to enact environmental processes through material structure rather than represent them symbolically.

Current Work

• Co-founder, Submergency Collective (arts-science collaboration on marine environments)

• Thalassic (2025-ongoing) — A composition that transforms itself continuously over decades, eroding electroacoustic musical material through algorithmic processes until the work itself decides it has reached equilibrium

• PhD Researcher, University of Tasmania (aiming for submission early-2026)

Recent Commissions

• Melbourne Symphony Orchestra - "Submergence|y" (2025)

• Van Diemen’s Band - "Sirens" program (2025)

• The Bowerbird Collective - “Songs of Disappearance: Great Southern Reef” (2026)

• Julia Fredersdorff - "Bodies of Water" for baroque violin and electronics (2026)

• Ten Days on the Island - “Thalassic” (2027)

Approach
Environmental sound art | Embodied research | Underwater field recording | Arts-science collaboration | Climate justice through creative practice