Cathy van Eck (1979 Belgium/Netherlands) is a composer, sound artist, and researcher in the arts. She focuses on composing relationships between everyday objects, human performers, and sound. Her artistic work includes performances with live-electronics and installations with everyday objects. She is interested in setting her movements, actions and gestures into relationships with a rich palette of different sounds, exploring peculiar sonic sceneries. The result could be called “performative sound art”, since it combines elements from performance art, electronic music, and visual arts. She regularly performs her own works such as Empty Chairs, In Paradisum, Cheering for Others Makes You a Leader, and Song No 3. Her work transcends genres and is presented at occasions as diverse as experimental or electronic music concerts, open air festivals, sound art gallery venues, digital art events, or performance art festivals. She is a member of iii (instrument inventors initiative), an artist run, community platform supporting new interdisciplinary practices linking performance, technology and the human senses.
Cathy is a professor at the Department for Sound Arts of the Academy of the Arts in Bern, Switzerland and had a Konrad Boehmer Visiting Professorship at the Institute for Sonology in The Hague, Netherlands from 2020 till 2024. She is a regular guest lecturer at other art and music universities. In her PhD-research Between Air and Electricity (supervised by Richard Barrett, Marcel Cobussen and Frans de Ruiter), she investigated the use of microphones and loudspeakers as musical instruments. Her book Between Air and Electricity – Microphones and Loudspeakers as Musical Instruments has been published in 2017 and she writes regularly on www.microphonesandloudspeakers.com. Her current research is on the possibilities of connections between gestures, sensors and sounds.
