Canadian composer Andrew Staniland discusses The Laws of Nature, out August 1, 2025

Transmission 239: Interview with Andrew Staniland

Andrew Staniland is a Canadian composer working across acoustic, electronic, and electroacoustic music. His work includes chamber and orchestral compositions, digital instruments, and film scores, often incorporating custom-built technology into performance.

Title: The Laws of Nature
Artist: Andrew Staniland
Genres: Ambient, Contemporary Classical, Electronica, Experimental Music
Label: Leaf Music
Description: Interview with Andrew Staniland about EEG data, composition, and The Laws of Nature, out August 1, 2025 on Leaf Music.

Trained initially as a jazz guitarist, Staniland shifted toward composition through academic study and early commissions. He founded the Memorial ElectroAcoustic Research Lab (MEARL) at Memorial University in Newfoundland, where he developed instruments such as MUNE and JADE—tools that interact with touch and biometric data, including EEG brainwaves.

His upcoming album, The Laws of Nature, created using data from dancers’ brainwaves, will be released by Leaf Music on August 1, 2025, in collaboration with producer John DS Adams.

What first got you interested in making music? Who were your earliest musical influences?

Oh, my entry into music was through the guitar, for sure. There was a guitar laying around my family’s house, and also an old piano. I always loved to fiddle around on them.

I think I was always a composer, I just didn’t know there was a name for it. That was my entry point. I still play guitar all the time today, for sure.

Do you remember the moment you decided to become a composer?

Yeah. I was really focused on the instrument at first. As a guitarist, I went to jazz college and learned how to be a professional player. Creativity is always part of a guitarist’s way of doing things, unless you come through the classical stream.

Guitarists are always making up their own stuff, always permitted to create and tinker. So I think being a composer was just a very natural way of making music. As I went through the education system, I met some formative teachers who recognized my interests and abilities in the area.

I slowly focused my efforts and redefined myself as a composer through my education, through my mentors, and my career grew up around that. It really starts with your first commission, then you get another, and all of a sudden you’ve written 100 pieces and have a career. It’s a very organic process.

When did you start working seriously with electronics and why?

I think I’ve got to point again to the guitar, because even though I started on an acoustic guitar, the guitar is a hybrid instrument. It’s acoustic in its essence, but as soon as you electrify it, electronics become part of the sound. Electric guitarists have experience with pedals—delays, all kinds of ways to transform the sound.

So it was a very natural extension for me to take this acoustic, contemporary classical composition language and put electronics into the same world. It just made sense to me. As soon as I plugged in a guitar, I think that was the beginning of my interest in mixing electronics.

What inspired you to found MERAL?

MERL stands for Memorial Electroacoustic Research Lab.

I founded MERL when I first started my job at the university here at Memorial. There was an existing electronic music facility, but it hadn’t been updated in a long time.

I saw an opportunity to create a new lab where you could not only compose and teach, but also do some interesting interdisciplinary work. I took that opportunity to found the studio. Since then, MERL has been a center for many unanticipated and fascinating adventures over the years.

How did the idea for the JADE instrument come about? Do you see JADE as a finished tool or something you’ll keep evolving?

I think it’s definitely in the process of evolution. JADE came up around the end of the development of the MUNE instrument, which did really well.

One of my research assistants, Scott Stevenson, turned MUNE into his full-time entrepreneurial job for a couple of years. He really carried it a long way.

Everything was going well, and I was continually looking for funding to continue developing new directions and research with MUNE. But as things become more established, ironically, it gets harder to raise capital for research because it’s no longer new.

I was working with a grants officer trying to find a new path forward with MUNE, and they kind of jokingly said, “Well, can’t you do something new?” I thought, that’s an interesting idea.

What would that be? I considered combining all the things I was interested in at the time—composition, digital instruments, and this mindfulness practice I had recently discovered. What happens if we put all three in the same room and create a new instrument?

What would it look like? That was the driving question behind JADE. We developed JADE much in the same way as MUNE, with some very talented young researchers: Mark Bennett, Alicia Leonard, and Andy Fisher. They all helped me. JADE came together quite quickly. That’s how we started.

What’s the main difference between JADE and MUNE?

I think MUNE is, at its essence, an electronic instrument based on touch—essentially a controller. JADE, on the other hand, was developed to do three different things.

One of those functions has turned out to be much more interesting than the others and is currently getting most of the attention. The big difference with JADE is that it’s not something you touch with your fingers or gestures—it responds to your biorhythms.

So, things like your heartbeat—we did some interesting work with that—and of course the EEG mode, using a headband that reads five types of brainwaves.

That’s the biggest difference: one you touch, and one you don’t.

During the brainwave project with Kittiwake Dance Theatre, did any dancer’s data lead to unexpected results?

Everything was unexpected on that one. There’s a really funny story about John Cage’s work in this area. This technology was brought in while he was working with dance, using a theremin-style device that could sense radio interference from the dancers’ proximity.

It was supposed to create nuanced music that would respond to the dance. When they turned it on, all it did was buzz. So in one way, it was a technical failure—but John allegedly loved it and thought it was perfect.

That’s the essence of artistic exploration: what happens when you put an EEG sensor on a dancer, send them the sound of their brainwaves, and they begin to move in response to what they hear? What happens when you create this feedback loop?

All kinds of interesting things happened. It was fascinating to see how the dancers felt connected to it because they knew the sound was coming from them.

That was really unexpected. Sometimes the technology doesn’t work well—data flow gets interrupted, leading to pauses in the music or other anomalies. We just embrace it all as happy accidents.

Which track from the album was the hardest to finish and why?

I think the hardest part of the album was figuring out the order of the music. The pieces themselves were written so effortlessly—I don’t think anything was difficult at all.

The flow was just right. That happens sometimes. A piece I’d written before this album, a violin concerto called Six Enigmas—you can find it on YouTube—took almost a year to complete.

But with this album, all 12 pieces came together and were finished within about three months.

So there was no difficulty in the production itself. But deciding how to present it as a through line was very challenging. Should the dancer portraits come first, followed by the bigger piece, Laws of Nature? Or should the more impressive piece come first, and then the portraits?

It was difficult to decide that order, for sure.

How do Dancer Portraits and The Laws of Nature relate to each other?

Yeah, that’s a good question. The Dancer Portraits each preserve a fairly substantial piece of what came out of the session with the dancer—their brainwaves. This includes both the MIDI data—notes, chords, melodies—and also the sound world we were working with.

I would take the original data from the sessions and try not to alter it too much. I would frame it, make decisions about structure, but it was a much more hands-off process. It was about letting it be what it is, which is a lovely way to compose.

With the second piece, The Laws of Nature, I’m still using all the same motifs and material from the sessions, but I was more interested in applying compositional control—making more choices myself about how to structure and develop things.

There’s much more composition happening in The Laws of Nature, more decisions from me, whereas Dancer Portraits take a more mindful—not exactly minimal, but more restrained—approach.

Besides JADE and MUNE, what gear do you always bring to the studio or stage?

Well, my favorite guitar is an old 1990s Fender Strat, and I love my tube Deluxe—my Deluxe Reverb amplifier. Those are my favorite tools as a guitarist.

As a composer, the most important thing to bring into the studio is what we call beginner’s mind. That’s the best tool. If you can show up without expectations and simply be receptive to what’s going to happen, I think that’s the most important thing you can bring into the studio. It’s a good attitude.

What new project are you working on now?

Right now, I just finished a piece for the Electro Women’s Choir in Vancouver, Canada, which I’m very excited about. It’s scheduled to premiere in March.

I’m also getting ready to do the score for a new movie coming out soon. It’s very secret—I can’t tell you the title—but that’s what’s next.

How is scoring for film different from composing for live performance?

That’s another excellent question. One of the reasons I’m so fond of this record, The Laws of Nature, is that it draws from all the different activities I do. I have an active practice in contemporary classical live music—both acoustic and electroacoustic—and I love that. I also work in digital instruments, like the MUNE and JADE. And then there’s my career in film. This project brings all three ways of working together, which is part of why I’m so excited about it.

To answer your question more specifically, the big difference with film music—similar to music for dance—is that you have to leave room. That applies in many ways. You’re sharing the sonic space with dialogue, sharing it with sound effects, and also sharing the storytelling space with the visual narrative.

Successful film music is really dialed back, even though we don’t always perceive it that way. When people think of film scores, they often think of big orchestral cues—Star Wars, for example. And there are moments for that. But good film music leaves space for the other elements.

It’s a healthy attitude to bring into all your work. Less is more in composition. Great composers know exactly how much to bring, and they don’t lose focus on what’s important. Film music is a concentrated version of that idea.

I think all composers should write for film, just to be reminded of that reality.

Photos courtesy of Andrew Staniland

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others