Essays

A selection of essays and reflective texts on listening, disability, composition and the cultural history of sound. These pieces sit somewhere between scholarship and practice: longer and more considered than blog posts, but often more personal or exploratory than academic publications.

My Personal Soundscape (2025)

A reflection on how lived hearing difference shapes attention, environment, and the experience of everyday sound.

Composing (my) hearing: some reflections (2020)

An exploration of how diplacusis and hearing asymmetry have altered my compositional thinking and musical perception.

Aural Diversity and EDI in Music Higher Education (2020)

A critical argument for reframing equality, diversity and inclusion in music through the lens of hearing difference.

Aural Diversity (2018)

An early articulation of the concept of aural diversity and its implications for music, institutions, and listening practices.

Return to Looe Island (2018)

A reflective return to an early creative site, linking memory, landscape and digital experimentation.

Ontology of Silence (2017)

A meditation on silence not as absence, but as a structural and perceptual condition within music and culture.

Ménière’s and Me (2017)

A personal account of balance disorder and hearing loss, and the slow reconstruction of identity that followed.

Composer’s Statement (2013)

A concise overview of my compositional approach, influences, and the role of systems and listening in my work.

For shorter and more frequent writing, see Andrew Hugill, where I write about music, composition, research and creative work, and Autistic Professor, which focuses on autism, disability and neurodivergent experience.