Professor Toby Young

Toby Young is a composer, producer and creative leader developing new forms of storytelling and audience experience through immersive performance and emerging technology. He is Professor of Music and Innovation at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Principal Investigator of Immersive Opera (2024–32), a £1.4 million UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship developing new forms of operatic dramaturgy through spatial audio, XR and interactive design. Working with partners including the Royal Ballet and Opera, English National Opera, d&b audiotechnik and Punchdrunk Enrichment, the programme explores how immersive and interactive media can reshape emotional connection, audience access and production models across the opera sector.

His wider work examines how established artistic forms and institutions respond to cultural and technological change, with a particular focus on reimagining heritage art forms for contemporary audiences. His latest book, Opera Remixed (Cambridge University Press, 2026), traces the rise of operatic hybridity and examines how forms including popera and musical theatre disrupt classical vocal paradigms. Its final case study reimagines operatic arias for TikTok, offering a practical model for how opera can challenge established conventions to engage new audiences on contemporary platforms. Toby has published widely across musicology, cultural sociology and philosophy, including work in Performance Research, Cultural Trends and co-editing a special issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics. His books also include The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Dance Music (2026), The Cambridge Companion to Composition (2024) and The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music (2022).

As the former Music Supervisor of Punchdrunk, Toby contributed to the sound worlds of major stage and screen projects including The Burnt City and the BAFTA-nominated The Third Day for Sky/HBO. He previously worked on the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Audience of the Future programme, developing virtual reality and spatial audio experiences that placed audiences ‘inside’ the orchestra and extended the reach of live symphonic performance. He is also an established producer of opera and orchestral recordings and has led projects for the Philharmonia, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, Chineke! Orchestra, the Royal Opera, English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Opera North, English Touring Opera and Grange Park Opera. His screen credits include La Voix humaine for the BBC, The Turn of the Screw for Marquee TV and La bohème for Finite Films.

Toby’s Ivor Novello-nominated creative work spans classical, commercial and immersive contexts. His concert music is published by Oxford University Press and has been performed internationally, with more than one hundred commissions including work for the London Symphony Orchestra, Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral and New College, Oxford. As a commercial music producer, he has collaborated with artists including Chase & Status, Duran Duran, Florence Welch, and the Rolling Stones, with charting releases broadcast across BBC Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3, 6 Music and 1Xtra. His immersive sound installations include commissions for the Design Museum, the National Trust, Porsche and Outernet London.

Toby holds a doctorate in music and philosophy from the University of Oxford and undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge, where he was a choral scholar in the Choir of King’s College. Before joining Guildhall, he was Senior Lecturer in Music at Keble College, Oxford and a Brettschneider Visiting Fellow at Cornell University. His previous research appointments include a Carolyn and Franco Gianturco Junior Research Fellowship at Linacre College, Oxford, a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at Guildhall and a Visiting Research Fellowship in Philosophy at the University of Bristol. His other funded research includes the NERC impact project Raise a Voice, which explored how collective music-making can support cultural understanding around environmental change, and the AHRC-funded Embodied Voices network, examining the ethics and politics of representation in contemporary performance.

Alongside his artistic and research practice, Toby advises organisations across the creative industries on innovation strategy, audience development and immersive experience. In 2025, he co-founded HoloEdge, a creative technology company developing production and broadcast tools for the opera sector. He also serves as a non-executive director and adviser to several music and technology ventures, helping to shape new business models, commercial opportunities and sustainable organisational growth. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and sits on the boards of British Youth Opera, Nonclassical and New Opera Dialogues.