Biography

Amble is a composer and sound artist who uses disability theory, body sensor technology, spoken word interviews and electronics to create unique sound works. She is interested in the interface between the disabled body and the exterior world, and has explored this through numerous sound walks using her wheelchair. Amble is a Royal Philharmonic Society Composer 24/25, recently won a Special Commendation Daphne Oram Award for her work in electronic music, and was selected as Scotland’s representative for the International Society Contemporary Music Festival 2024.

Amble recently wrote Divergent Sounds in collaboration with Kings College London. The piece uses interviews with NeuroDivergent people, electronics, body sensors and a 13 piece orchestral ensemble. It was premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank. She was one of five Creative Scotland International Creative Entrepreneurship Fellows, a BBC Performing Arts Fellow, has gained several large scale grants from Creative Scotland to produce work and was a BBC alumni fellow. She was also a Mimu Glove research resident in 2022.

Artist’s Statment

My practice—spanning performance art, installation, sound works, composition, and improvisation, —exists at the intersection of Disability Justice, critical theory, and radical creativity. Rooted in the conviction that art is both a mirror and a catalyst for social transformation, I integrate frameworks from Disability Studies, philosophy, and activism to dismantle ableist structures embedded in artistic creation, production, and reception. My work does not merely represent disability; it embodies a methodology where disability culture shapes both content and process, forging a cyclical dialogue between theory and practice.

 

Guided by the insights of Michel Foucault, Mike Oliver, Jillian Weise, and Fiona Kumari Campbell, I interrogate how power operates within music and sound art. By applying Oliver’s Social Model and Bar-Yam’s networked structures, I reimagine collaborative frameworks that reject the “charity” or “virtuosic genius” paradigms dominating mainstream arts. Instead, my projects prioritize non-hierarchical creation: Access Riders, flexible timelines, adaptive outcomes, and active negotiation of conflicting needs. These practices are not logistical concessions but ethical imperatives, centring disabled agency and dismantling the myth of artistic “objective quality.”

 

Audience engagement becomes a site of collaboration and revelation. Through autoethnographic soundscapes, I document encounters with ableism, inviting listeners to interrogate their own complicity in systemic oppression. Projects like We Ask These Questions of Everybody amplify the plurality of disabled voices, disrupting reductive tropes of “inspiration porn” or “kill/cure” narratives. Similarly, Balancing Act fuses experimental composition with biopolitical critique, framing music as resistance—a visceral challenge to audiences who consume art as passive, apolitical aesthetic objects. Here, sound is not divorced from struggle; it vibrates with the urgency of bodies navigating inaccessible spaces, medicalised surveillance, and cultural erasure.

My interdisciplinary research—bridging New Musicology, Disability Studies, and philosophy—reveals how ableism permeates music’s very foundations: its pedagogies, aesthetics, and economies. By composing through a lens of Crip Technoscience (after Weise), I expose the cyborg realities of disabled existence: bodies augmented by assistive technologies, yet perpetually Othered as “unhuman.” In response, I craft sonic and visual installations that celebrate hybridity, where fractured rhythms, glitched textures, and adaptive improvisation become metaphors for survival in a world hostile to difference.

 

This practice is not solitary. It thrives in collaboration with disabled artists, scholars, and communities, amplifying our collective reimagining of what art could be. From scored improvisations that honour neurodivergent communication to installations that sonify the weight of chronic pain, every work is a manifesto. It declares that disability is not a deficit to overcome but a creative force—a way of listening, moving, and making that fractures normative boundaries.

 

Ultimately, my art is a call to unlearn. To dismantle the stage, the gallery, the concert hall—spaces built on exclusion—and rebuild them through Disability Justice. Here, “accommodation” is not an afterthought but the foundation; “access” is not a burden but a collective liberation. In this world, music is not something we hear. It is something we do: a radical act of care, a networked resistance, a future already unfolding.