Rachel Meyers is a Tasmanian composer and musician working across experimental, electroacoustic and chamber music. Her work lives in the entanglements of ecology, listening and the more-than-human, asking how somatic connection helps us make sense of the world. Working with site and water as both material and method, she listens with place rather than to it. Rachel is an Associate Artist with the Australian Music Centre, and commissioned/presented by Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, MONA FOMA, Ten Days on the Island, Next Wave Festival and Liquid Architecture. She was recipient of Australian Music Centre competitive commission MOMENTUM: Composing Lutruwita in 2026.

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 rarely successful in shifting 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 draw audiences into the physical experience of water rather than its depiction, using field recording, voice, and the marks that cold leaves on a performing body.

Rachel is in the final stages of completing a practice-led PhD at the University of Tasmania, "Southern Ecophony: Towards an Aqueous Compositional Practice." Built on three years of daily cold-water swimming at Kingston Beach, the research treats immersion as compositional method rather than subject matter. Through retrospective analysis of her own portfolio, she identifies a condition she names pre-articulated synthesis, in which embodied practice, theory, environmental ethics, and compositional craft converge within compositional intuition before any can be separated or named. The thesis traces how sustained immersion reorganised her compositional language from within, a shift from depicting water to being structurally changed by it. Her peer-reviewed research has been published in Fusion Journal, The Polar Journal, and Openwork Journal (Columbia University Press).

Rachel has performed at major Australian festivals and venues including MONA FOMA, Four Winds, Dark MOFO, Ukaria, Melbourne Recital Centre and the National Folk Festival, and is a founding member of Van Diemen's Fiddles.

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