Hello and Welcome

Dr Natalie Hyacinth is a composer and academic creating and thinking about music at the intersections of technology, climate justice and Black life. Natalie’s artworks are intersectional and interdisciplinary, inspired by diverse sonic fields such as free jazz, hip hop, dub and electronic music, while drawing upon conceptual themes from Afrofuturism, Philosophy and Cultural Geography, to Black Studies, Ethnomusicology and Aesthetics. Experimenting with sounds and sonic technologies as a form of defiance and resistance, Natalie seeks to create new sound worlds as part of her activism, a creative practice she explores under the name The Black Astral.

Natalie is a recent recipient of University of Bristol’s Brigstowe Institute and Cabot Institute for the Environment’s Personal to the Planetary 2024/2025 Fellowship. Selected as part of a cohort of ten Bristol based artists and academics, the Fellows worked creatively within communities to have discussions about how people usually absent from climate debates can be brought to the fore and to consider a humanist and artistic response to the climate emergency. Through the Fellowship, Natalie developed Sonic Earth, a sound art project that seeks to understand how climate change is affecting the ways in which we hear and listen. Natalie created Sonic Earth as a creative sonic intervention; if we understand the effects climate change is having on the sonic world, then perhaps we can work together to save it. Through original compositions, field recordings and interviews, Sonic Earth asks: if the Earth could speak, what could it tell us? If the Earth speaks, are we listening?

Natalie was also one of three selected sound artists on the Nordic Music Days Sustainable Composition and Creative Sound Practices 2024/2025 programme focused on sustainable composition, encouraging composers and sound artists to integrate sustainability into their creative processes. As part of the programme, Natalie undertook a digital residency programme in spring 2025 focussed on making music with a sustainable lens. The programme culminated with an exhibition of her work at the 2025 Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival in November 2025.

Natalie has worked on a number of academic projects, most recently as a Researcher and Research Manager on the ERC funded Sonic Street Technologies project based at Goldsmiths, University of London, as a Senior Research Associate on the University of Bristol ESRC Everyday Integration project and as a Doctoral Researcher on the AHRC Making Suburban Faith project. Natalie is currently an Outreach Officer for British Forum of Ethnomusicology. Natalie’s writing has featured extensively in books, academic journals, zines and online texts. Her writings on Black music have recently appeared in the Black Music in Britain in the 21st Century edited collection, the Black British Gospel Music: From the Windrush Generation to Black Lives Matter book and the Sound of Lewisham: From 1950s to Now text, available online. 

Natalie is a founding member of the Black Music and Cultures Research Group London that seeks to centre Black female writings and thought on diaspora Black music and culture and makes and thinks about sonic worlds as part of the Sonic CyberFeminisms Collective. Along with Rosina, Natalie co-founded A Space to Breathe to provide a space for Black women to come together in nature, to organise and reflect upon ways to thrive. Natalie has a keen interest in the intersections between social justice, environmental equity and technology. Her academic work, as well as her artistic practices involving sound and sonic technologies reflect this. Natalie welcomes collaboration, experimentation and inclusion in her work.