Ian Hawgood

Ian Hawgood is a British composer, sound artist, field recordist, tape-based mastering engineer and founder of Home Normal, the independent label he established in Tokyo in 2009. His solo and collaborative work has appeared on labels including 12k, Morr Music, IIKKI, Quiet Details and Dragon’s Eye, as well as through projects such as Slow Reels and Observatories.

After periods living and working in Italy, Japan and Poland, Hawgood is now based on the East Sussex coast, where he runs a mastering studio centred on analogue tape. His practice combines reel-to-reel tape, modular synthesis, piano, acoustic instruments and environmental recordings—including hydrophone and geophone recordings—to explore memory, place, decay and the shifting boundary between signal and noise.

Hawgood was a guest composer at EMS in October 2024. Material recorded there using the Serge modular system and SYNTRX became the 2025 release we are but dream. His recent work also includes well, here we are for Quiet Details.

Alongside his sound practice, Hawgood is undertaking MSc research in cognitive psychology at the University of Sussex. Using eye-tracking pupillometry, his current research investigates predictive processing and listening effort in degraded speech perception—examining how expectation and acoustic information interact when sound is unclear. His broader interest lies in how research into auditory cognition might inform future clinical approaches to listening and communication support.