25 September 2025
A Conversation with Aaron Wyatt by Noah Lawrence
Written by Noah Lawrence, September 2025
The guest for our final AYO ‘Resonate’ professional development session of the year was Aaron Wyatt: composer, violist, researcher, conductor – a truly rounded musician of our time, and the perfect artist to sum
up all of the conversations we have engaged in over our four sessions.
What struck me during the discussion was Aaron’s focus on the future: here was a Noongar man on the cutting edge of music technology research. He has performed in his Decibel New Music Ensemble since early in his career, and developed the Decibel ScorePlayer, an iPad app, to enhance his performances. He is currently extending the ScorePlayer’s capabilities as part of a PhD in animated graphic notation at Monash University.
What was equally interesting was Aaron’s insight into the state of AI: he expounded how AI is really just a machine that makes predictions – a ‘plausible sentence generator’ that spits out the next most likely word in the sentence it is creating. Not quite the terrifying artificial intelligence we have all come to know! Aaron elaborated, discussing how AIs can ‘hallucinate’ – output completely false statements – and about the concept of ‘model collapse,’ where AIs begin to train on their own false data and end up destroying their credibility even further.
The future of technology is a domain where traditional voices are noticeably absent; it felt important to hear from a First Nations artist who was visibly engaging with and shaping technology. Often innovation and progress are framed as oppositional to ancient knowledge and indigeneity – Aaron Wyatt is a walking rebuttal to that framing. His work feels like a step towards a very valuable exchange between these two influential parts of society.
“It was refreshing to hear about this in an age where the prevailing mindset is that one needs to hyper-specialise to succeed – there is often a narrative that argues one must commit themselves fully to music, or even to only their
instrument, otherwise they will not have the necessary skills to ‘make it.”
Something else that impressed on me was Aaron’s similarity to a Baroque musician. The Baroque musician was a jack of all trades – a virtuoso, composer, improviser, musicologist, treatise-writer, and much more. In the same vein, Aaron refuses to define himself in one way, and instead uses his different artistic pursuits to inform each other.
It was refreshing to hear about this in an age where the prevailing mindset is that one needs to hyper-specialise to succeed – there is often a narrative that argues one must commit themselves fully to music, or even to only their instrument, otherwise they will not have the necessary skills to ‘make it.’ There are also countless tales of legendary musicians in the past who gave up the rest of their life in favour of manic devotion to their craft.
This discussion offered an alternative: many of the most interesting discoveries, in art and in life, are made at the boundaries between different fields, and Aaron is an example of somebody working at these boundaries and contributing richly to different areas of art and society.
This AYO program is designed to forge more thoughtful, aware, and responsible artists for the next generation through brave and critical discussion. Our guest Aaron Wyatt was a fitting end to the year: a multifaceted musician pioneering new modes of art and challenging the status quo.