From building a robot that can jam with musicians, to pursuing a PhD in mathematics, to playing in a folk band as a teen and performing at a tech-art rave in South Korea recently, Toby Gifford has never followed a conventional path.

His career has always defied labels and refused to fit neatly into a box. 

Science and maths seemed to dominate Toby's early years in Canberra and he was on a clear path to continue a career in these fields. He even headed to the USA, where the best supervisors were at the time, to pursue a PhD. 

"In high school I was gang busters into science and physics and jumped straight into a Bachelor of Science at the Australian National University and even did my honours in maths," Toby says.

"After that I went straight into a PhD in the US, but two years into it I woke up and thought, 'what am I doing?'

"I looked at a paper I was reading and wondered if this really mattered – it was a reality check that I wasn't as into it as I used to be.

"I really thought I was going to be a mathematician."

Toby made the move back to his hometown and started pursuing his love for theatre.

But at the end of the day that wasn't paying the bills, he says. 

His next job was organising the rosters for the security guards at Parliament House – all 250 of them. 

It was the 1990s and computers weren't the norm yet. He was given a book and pencil to sort out the shifts. But there was a lone computer in the room, and it didn't take long for Toby to automate the entire roster on Excel. 

So, he basically made himself redundant.

Toby's career brought him to Brisbane in the early 2000s. He stumbled across an instrument-making course at QUT that quickly turned into a PhD in music.

He's no stranger to music – he grew up playing the clarinet and was always in a band, and even regularly played in a folk band as a teen.

"My parents were into folk dancing, so the easiest way to get out of that was to be in the band, then no one could ask me to dance," he laughs.

His PhD led him to create a music-jamming robot, showing that he was a good decade or two ahead of the AI movement. 

Toby's creativity went well beyond this; he became interested in recording soundscapes and at the Queensland Conservatorium, he worked with another academic on a soundscape project that would last more than a decade.

You may know UniSC Senior Lecturer in Design, Leah Barclay – Toby has been working on research projects with her for years. 

Their research focuses on the soundscapes of rivers around the world to establish the health of the rivers and use the sounds in creative art and design.

It was Leah who nudged Toby to come to UniSC when a position became available. 

Toby has been a Lecturer in Design for four years and has reignited his research projects with Leah – River Listening and Biosphere Soundscapes.

Toby says his job is all about combining tech with creativity.

"Think about interactive designs, like an art gallery installation that's kinetic or interactive websites,” he says.

"The passion is about making interesting platforms for interacting.

"I'm happy I've landed in a job that supports my work.

"At a national level the Australian Research Council (ARC) has acknowledged the legitimacy of creative practice research, and I think UniSC is quite progressive in this area as well."

Toby's passion for creative design and technologies landed him an invite to a "tech art rave" in South Korea earlier this year. He got the crowd moving with "live experimental quantum music using a quantum mechanics model to generalise visualisations and sounds within a rave format". 

It's a hard one to wrap your head around, so Toby has provided this video – click here –  so we can catch a glimpse of him in action.

Looking ahead, Toby says that now the AI genie is out of the bottle; he's interested in finding ways for that ecosystem to be less environmentally impactful. 

"There's a lot in the AI sphere that I'd like to pursue. I'm not sure people are thinking in terms of the way the computation itself happens, so I'd like to look at ways that the computation requires less energy," he says.

For a researcher and artist whose career has always crossed disciplines, finding the right place hasn't been easy. And the path to success wasn't always clear.

But Toby says being named the country's Leading Researcher in Visual Arts for 2024 by The Australian's Research Magazine brought with it a strong sense of recognition and belonging.

This continues at UniSC, where Toby has found a community that values his unique blend of expertise and gives him the opportunity to inspire students through teaching and research.