Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist, lecturer and researcher. Her practice has been shaped by the women's movement, community activism and a DIY aesthetic and, more recently, by working in schools, colleges and universities. Long standing research interests include how sound relates to the past, our histories, environment and our collective and individual memories which has informed her compositional work and led to research into the use of spoken word in composition, gender and sound arts practices, sound and anthropology and listening. Her work consists of concert pieces, site specific installations, installed compositions or 'documusic' as well as edited books and articles. She has collaborated with a number of other artists, composers and musicians including cinematographer Cathy Greenhalgh, textile artist Tessa Brown, composer Nye Parry and she has a long term collaborative relationship with British choreographer Rosemary Butcher. Cathy Lane established the department of Sound Arts and Design and now co - directs Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) at the University of the Arts, London.

All my work involves some sort of field recording. Compositions for fixed media such as 'On the Machair' and 'Tweed' - part of an ongoing sonic investigation of the Outer Hebrides, remote islands off the coast of Scotland in the North of the UK - or '…the pickle jar is her home…' which explores food as a material, commodity and sounding substance, combine my recordings of place and people often with existing archival material and create compositions and installations which move between contextualising and abstracting. Other works such as the interactive installation 'The Memory Machine', 'In combat with….' made for the exhibition Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs in 2010 and 'Hidden Lives' use only recordings of people talking. In much of the music written for choreographer Rosemary Butcher over the last ten years ('Lapped Translated Lines', 'White', 'Scan') I have used field recordings as purely sonic material divorced from context. Most recently in the MAOS (Mobile Aural Observation Station) project which has so far been realised in London and in Bangalore, India seeks to offer a dedicated space to listen to site and combines field recordings with "real-time" listening.