We are delighted to announce that Jono Gilmurray, who graduated from Anglia Ruskin in 2007 with a 1st Class BA (Hons) Music/Creative Music Technology, has won the audience vote in the European Acoustic Heritage Water Soundscape Composition contest.

The competition 'encouraged composers and sound artists to share their sonic knowledge of cultures and contexts of water and imagine acoustic heritage in Europe invoking different listenings of soundscape'. Jono's submission, titled 'Badock's Wood II - The River Trym', was also awarded third prize by the jury, and selected for the European Acoustic Heritage exhibition, which opened in Tampere, Finland on 19 September. The exhibition will go on to tour through galleries in France, Belgium and Spain through 2012-13, with the winning entries also included in an accompanying multimedia book.

The jury described Jono's piece as 'beautiful water recordings... with playful and evocative shifts back and forth and subtle melodies' and '...as if our ears were oscillating in the air and under the water catching all the pitches of the liquidity.'

After graduating, Jono worked for a time in post-production sound for TV, before deciding to go back to university to concentrate on his compositional work. He is currently halfway through a MMus in Creative Sound and Media Technology, after which he intends to do a PhD, specialising in environmentally-themed, or 'ecoacoustic', music and sound art.

Jono told us: "I'm absolutely over the moon, as I not only won the public vote with more than half of all votes cast, but also won third place in the Jury's selection, which was headed by Andra McCartney, a respected figure in soundscape composition and pioneer in the creative use of soundwalking, whose work has been a great influence on my own!"

Of his music, he explained: "My compositional work stems from a belief in the potential of electroacoustic music, and soundscape composition in particular, to inspire a vital and fundamental reconnection between human beings and the ecosystem on which we all depend, and of which we are all an integral part - something which should be of primary importance to us all in this era of global climate change. In this particular piece, the harmonic and rhythmic interplay between the vocal and the river sounds aims to articulate the potential for this reconnection through the discovery of a common musical language."

"I'd also like to say a huge thank you to all the staff at Anglia Ruskin who taught me while I was there; when I look back now, I realise it was my time there, and the fantastic quality of the teaching I received, that gave me the skills, knowledge and confidence I needed to be able to follow my own path as a composer - as well as giving me a real head start on my postgraduate studies."

Full details of the competition winners are available on the European Acoustic Heritage website. You can hear Jono's piece, along with all the other submissions, on the contest page.

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