Dr Helen Anahita Wilson is an award-winning composer, sound artist, performer, and interdisciplinary researcher. As a Wellcome Trust Fellow (Early Career Award), her practice-based research engages with sound studies, transdisciplinary composition, and the health humanities in her project, "A Life in Sound: Transforming Understandings of Health and Wellbeing through Music, Sound, and Mode of Listening." Her distinctive methodology of artistic sonation creatively transducts quantitative, experiential, process-related, and biomedical data into non-lexical musical compositions, establishing new possibilities for how we understand and relate to our bodies through sound.

Wilson's compositional practice brings together research in South Asian musics, Western contemporary classical composition, sonic life writing, improvisation, and biophilic music making. She regularly works internationally with creative agencies, architects, curators, botanists, and healthcare providers to integrate music and sound in settings including hospitals, cultural institutions, and public spaces. Recent commissions include works for Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the United Nations, Brighton Dome and Festival, and the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. She has performed extensively across the UK, Europe, and India, and is a winner of an Oram Award for innovation in sound, music, and related technologies.

Research interests

• Composition
• Performance
• Sound Studies
• Practice Research
• Health Humanities

Expertise and public engagement

Wilson's work has been featured by Sky Arts, CNN, and New Scientist, and she has recently appeared on BBC Radio 4's Today and Broadcasting House, BBC Radio 3's The Essay and In Tune, BBC Radio 6Music, and the BBC World Service. She performs regularly at venues including Cafe OTO, IKLECTIK, and CTM Festival in Berlin, and her music has been described as "beautiful, otherworldly… and captivatingly unconventional" (The Sunday Times), and praised for its "quick-witted imagination and breathtaking technique" (The Wire). She chairs conference panels and events, designs and facilitates workshops, collaborates in co-production projects, and undertakes regular outreach work in connection with her socially-engaged practice.

Selected publications

• Wilson, H A., (2026). Sounds like Cancer: First Steps in Sonic Life Writing. Medical Humanities. Published Online First: 05 February 2026. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2025-013647