AYDA AKBAL

In 2024, Ayda was awarded the Global Professional Development Award by the American Australian Association and APRA AMCOS to support an internship at score-production company - Joy Music House - under the mentorship of CEO & Founder Catherine Joy - in Los Angeles. She was also awarded the Emerging Artist Grant from the Ian Potter Cultural Trust to support her internship.

Ayda was contacted by Marvel to compose the soundtrack for The Official Marvel Podcast, which was recorded remotely with the Budapest Scoring Orchestra. Akbal composer-assisted the feature film - The Surfer - starring Nicolas Cage, which had it's premiere at Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, and further worked as the studio-assistant at Melbourne's Allan Eatons for Fabulous Four.

She is immensely proud of the release of her album, Where Do I Belong? Here - in which she explores what it means to grow up first-generation Turkish-Australian. She is deeply moved by the response she's had and connections she's made since her release. She is immensely grateful to have received the 2023 Angus Gray Piano Performance Grant and Blackbird Protostars Grant to support the recording and mixing of her album Where Do I Belong? Here.

Ayda graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Psychology and Spanish & Latin American Studies) and Bachelor of Music (Composition & Music Technology) with the Sir Zelman Cowen Composition Commission Prize. Since then, she has worked as an orchestrator and copyist on a variety of projects involving the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and Perth Symphony Orchestra.

In 2023, she participated in APRA AMCOS' HighScore Co-Op and earned a bursary supported place at the 2023 MESS Game Audio Intensive to develop and sharpen her game audio skills and composition. Ayda composed and performed the feature song for the documentary MY SISTER LIV - a suicide prevention documentary created by Grammy- and Oscar-Award winning team - Alan Hicks and Paul DuPré Pesmen. Her song was nominated in the Music+Sound Awards Best Composition for Film Trailer category, the only song alongside Netflix and Hulu feature trailers.

Ayda began teaching composing workshops and attending panel's as a guest speaker at various music institutions, including The Arts Centre Melbourne, at Monash University, and Balcombe Grammar School.

In 2022, Ayda travelled to the US for the first time to undertake New York University's Film-Scoring Summer Intensive, where she was mentored by leading industry professionals. She was offered a spot on women-owned production company - MPATH Tracks. Later that year, Ayda earned a fully-funded spot at APRA AMCOS' Screen Music Songhubs, where she met her future-collaborators and mentors, composer Francois Tétaz and director Alan Hicks. She also participated in ESPN's & Women In Audio Mission's Composing for Film, TV, and Advertisement course - mentored by Catherine Joy.

Ayda began creating educational composing content with leading VST companies - such as Spitfire Audio, LABS, and Sonixinema - to promote knowledge sharing and collaboration in screen music industry's online space.

Ayda has orchestrated and arranged for various large-scale live performances, including for The Cat Empire Orchestra Project with the MSO, SSO, and TSO, the Perth Symphony Orchestra Strings (Perth, Australia), the Dawood Sarkhosh Australian Tour, the Truman Show Theatrical (Madrid, Spain), and The Brink Of Womanhood: An Original Musical (Chicago, Illinois). She also works as a band leader, pianist, and vocalist putting on various performances around the Melbourne music scene, for which she prepares and formats her scores and parts to (near) perfection.