Cavan is a PhD research student at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast. In 2006 he graduated from the same facility with a Masters in Sonic Arts focusing on novel interaction techniques and his dissertation ‘Creating Games With Feeling’ was presented at the CGames06 conference gaining the ‘Best Student Paper’ award. Cavan spent the following years playing bass in the Irish ‘rock’ group Catoan touring the UK and Ireland. In 2007 he engineered and co-produced Catoan’s ‘And Will I’ album released on the local ‘Curious Incident Records’ label. During this time Cavan also worked as technical director for Banjax Studios until 2007 and thereafter as technical director for Straandlooper Digital Animation Studios.

Cavan’s current PhD research, provisionally titled ‘The Spectator Understanding Of Performative Interaction’, examines the role of the spectator in new musical interactions. His work explores how the design process can be informed to create more communicative performances with digital musical instruments and recent publications have been presented at the CHI’09 and NIME’09 conferences.

Cavan’s work also includes developing new and innovative ways of breaking cheap electronic toys in order to re-purpose them into performance instruments alongside developing instrumental laptop performance.

http://www.cfyans.com/