Alison trained at the National Film and Television School and has a professional background in sound design for film and games. Before that, she worked as a percussionist and facilitator on community-led media and music programmes.

 

As with all soundies, Alison uses technology a lot, and her game audio work means she codes in Unity/Wwise. Currently, she is learning Python to expand her sound-led narrative design practice into live spaces and onto the web/mobile. She also likes to write live experiences, prose and poems to have a rest from the screens.

 

Alison recently completed a PhD exploring how narrative transportation can be created across sound and language. Her research applies knowledge of sound, writing and interactive narrative design in order to explore strategies for communicating difficult information about species extinction. The aspects of her research that set out a methodology for combining sound and language within multimodal composition have been published.

 

Alison collaborates with theatre companies, filmmakers, experience makers, people experimenting with narrative in VR/AR, dancers, social change agencies and sound recordists. She also sometimes returns to the NFTS to teach digital prototyping to writers. She swims outside a lot because otherwise, aside from field recording trips, she would never leave the city.


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