PhD Students

This project examines London’s electronic dance music scenes and spaces, exploring their relationship to contested notions of the night time as cultural territory, economic category, and site of urban governance. Ben is active in these scenes as a DJ and producer, and performs internationally as a drummer. 

Supervisor 

• Keith Negus

The aim of this research is to identify and implement soundscape improvement strategies in urban areas based on loudspeakers or sound sculptures placement in the outdoor environment and the use of a computer-based system for adaptive soundscape generation, integrating sonic art practice with acoustic engineering rigour.  

Supervisor

• John Drever

This PhD project explores sound in the everyday lives of three people in the early stages of dementia. Abilities around hearing and listening are often impacted by dementias, and the diversity of such abilities is under-represented in sound studies theory and practice.

Christopher works as collaboratively as possible with participants on sound works with the aim of simultaneously opening up interesting situations for engaging their listening and for trying to overcome particular difficulties around traditional, discursive fieldwork methods in this context.

Supervisor

• John Drever

Supervisor

• Berta Joncus

 The advancements of machine listening and its proliferation within the contemporary landscape of the ubiquitous interconnected device networks have raised significant concerns regarding its capacity to tacitly trace the lives of common devices/apps/platforms users, by transforming them into digital data.

These processes have strong implications in the functions of the soundscape and the way it might be studied. Through practice-based research, this project will investigate the agency, affects and effects of machine listening as a presence within everyday environments, and explore new ways to approach it through creative sonic practice.

The research will work with a theoretical framework drawing upon acoustic ecology, media theory, and critical posthumanism in order to experiment with the tangled relations between human listening and machine listening within the soundscape while searching for innovative ways of creating worlds with/in sound. 

Supervisor

• John Drever

This project investigates the intersection between Neurodivergent identity and music composition through practice research methodologies. By examining the creative practice of Neurodivergent musicians with crossmodal perceptions of sound and devising compositional strategies valorising this diversity, this study seeks to expand our understanding of Neurodivergent culture, to promote neurodiversity in the music world.

Supervisor

• John Drever

Existing sets of acoustic cues to either communicate or induce basic emotions present open and generic music elements. Such openness allows a specific set of acoustic cues for a specific emotion to be interpreted, elaborated, and arranged in different solutions, producing pieces of music that differ in genre. 

Would such difference in genres —maintaining the same acoustic cues— produce different results in communicating/inducting emotions? In other words, given a specific set of acoustic cues, would Schnittke be as effective as Chopin in inducing/communicating sadness to a listener?

Supervisors

• Ian Gardiner
• Joydeep Bhattacharya

Supervisors

• Lauren Redhead
• Iris Garrelfs

This project will create a new musical syntax that allows for the free integration of half, quarter, third, sixth, eighth, twelfth, and sixteenth tones within a single composition. I will also work to improve existing microtonal notational systems to more clearly represent each of these seven musical intervals and the relationships between them.

I want to make microtonal music intelligible not only to avant-garde specialists but to the average undergraduate or dedicated amateur orchestral musician. My research will also elucidate the significant overlap in seemingly dissimilar harmonic systems, encouraging composers, theorists, historians, and educators to adopt a more globally inclusive perspective. 

Supervisor

• Lauren Redhead

This composition project offers the opera composer a new perspective on working with sound, based on recent practice in film, theatre and opera. I define five modalities of sound, forming a conceptual basis upon which to integrate sound practice into opera, and exemplify this approach in a triptych of chamber operas (Her face was of flowers, Vicky and Albert, and The Trilobite, Or The Fall of Mr Williams), which point the way to further development and exploration of opera with integrated sound design. 

Supervisor

• Lauren Redhead

Working with migrants in Lewisham, I will explore methodologies for distributed authorship within the music of documentary film. Through improvisation and composition workshops, film and sound recording exercises and interviews, this research will forge new ways for ‘non-musician’ participants to collectively compose a musical score.

The interdisciplinary creative output will be a 60-minute poetic film integrating both participant testimony and music, a workshop model for hybrid documentary storytelling within community/educational settings. By exploring the parameters of a new ‘documentary hybrid’ (Ferrarini 2020) and building upon community music practice techniques, this research will challenge the hierarchical norms of film-maker/participant, composer/performer and  musician/non-musician relationships, allowing for a polyphony of voices, to collectively explore the subject of migrancy through subjective memory. 

Supervisors

• Barley Norton
• Holly Rogers

This study considers the relationship between the human and the machine in the production of popular music utilising Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related technologies, through the lens of liveness, asking how the human and AI shape each other and what the consequences are.

The methodology is both diachronic and synchronic: (1) outlining the historical contexts that qualify roles of musicians, engineers, and AI in contemporary popular music production and (2) understanding the mutual relationship that people construct with the technology in such practices, considering elements associated with liveness.

Through drawing on the concept of liveness as a framework, this study also aims to update the concept itself.

Supervisor

• Keith Negus

The found scores is a practice-based research question on the composer’s roles, not to create a score of a musical notation, instead of finding and selecting the score, which has another function in our everyday life than sound and music, but to question listening, rather than merely extending the musical notation.

Furthermore, the found scores examine the social-historical aspects and story of the everyday materials' interrelation with the radio frequencies in a specific place and time to reflect critically on the sound material and listening elements. Therefore, the found scores as a site-specific material intend to draw a structure for a composition project that questions how the sound material's relationship with space and time creates other listening mediums.

By extension, the found score can reflect the politics of composition, performance and listening.

Supervisor

• Lauren Redhead

This thesis explores the forms and workings of “historical consciousness” – that is, the ways that the past is addressed, made or perceived – in contemporary popular music. An ambitious, multicultural array of case studies, focused on the UK, Italy and Argentina, examines a wide range of popular music practices, making use of historical study and qualitative research methods including interviews and ethnography.

Through these case studies, the thesis argues that contemporary forms of pop historical consciousness are much more productive and more dynamic than is suggested by an extant literature on pop’s pastness, which is dominated by concepts of “cultural nostalgia”, “retromania” and “heritage.”

The thesis comes to demonstrate how historically conscious pop music practices in the 21st century constitute and further a sophisticated dialogue with local and international histories and memories. The thesis develops an under-investigated topic in popular music studies and addresses a broader range of contemporary creative and interpretive practices than has been considered in any single work on pop's historicity, exploring together pop's production, historical curation and critical reception. The study of pop practices in three very different national cultures demonstrates the ways in which contemporary pop’s historical consciousness commonly functions across the world and the geographic and cultural limitations of those aforementioned (European and North American) dominant theories.

Supervisor

• Tom Perchard

This project utilises scenography and current design practice as a visual language to deconstruct and confront the issues of narrative and generic ambiguity in Prokofiev’s Fiery Angel. Each chapter examines a case study, starting with the first production in Venice (1955) and leading up to the most recent productions in New York and Madrid. My examination of these productions will be informed by my own experience as a scenographic practitioner and will culminate in my own practice-based designs.

Supervisor

• Tamsin Alexander

This research explores the context of Thai music that relates to Thai dance, and how traditional music is produced to accompany the dance. It asks how musicians and dancers respond to each other and explores how metaphor allows communication when performing on stage.

It explores the historical context, transmission, and function of the music itself especially Thai traditional music - Piphat Dukdamban (the ensemble) - which was primarily constructed to welcome foreigners during the period of King Rama V of Thailand (reigned 1868-1910).

Supervisor

• Barley Norton

This practice-based research collapses normative epistemologies of popular song in response to a dominant discourse that understands popular music as commercial product – the recording.

My research challenges this perspective by resting the focus on process in songwriting. The project is anti-ableist and will establish inclusive and accessible epistemologies of popular song, which speak to wide-ranging research and professional communities from the authoritative position of practice.

Supervisor

• Caroline Kennedy

This thesis explores the overlooked influence of Victorian and Edwardian culture upon British popular music of the 1960s. Utilising archival research, the work investigates a broad range of both local and mass-mediated popular music, analysing the continued presence of performance cultures, class mentalities and notions of Englishness all with origins in the nineteenth century.

In an era where the sixties are cast as a radical departure from previous British socio-cultural tradition, this work aims to challenge that narrative by mapping an alternative 1960s in which popular music carried and reflected continuity as well as change.

Supervisor

• Keith Negus
• Tom Perchard

Utilising 53-tone just-intonation through the construction of unique collaborative instruments, this practice-based research explores the concepts of eternity within composition and performance.

Following linear intervallic pathways creates tonal revolutions that further lead to temporal enclosures with a collective absence of beginnings or endings. The form exemplifies the notions of the ‘dwelling space’; an internal/eternal power system that provides sonically driven sculptural properties.

Supervisor

• Lauren Redhead

This paper provides contextual grounding for my practice research project that, using collaborative improvised musicking over the internet, explores the experiences of women sound artists from the Middle East.

Current experimental music practices often exclude this demographic, predominantly accommodating artists in the West. The relative abundance of literature expounding the genius of male experimental sound artists and musicians contrasts sharply with the lack of representation of women in the field, particularly from the global South.

My project explores this silencing through jamming and performing improvisational music with a collaborative ensemble, Heya Collective, comprised of three female sound artists from Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and myself. Through theoretical lenses such as Marie Thompson and Annie Goh’s sonic cyberfeminisms, Goh’s concept of sounding situated knowledges and Stoever’s Listening Ear, I question whether it is possible to formally address the absence of knowledge with respect to identity, experience and activism of women from the Middle East who practice experimental musics.

I argue instead that by accommodating opaqueness, I submit to the agency of the Other. Durational practices of listening to each other through the network and agency imbedded in improvisation and dialogue, while acceding to not knowing, shapes the capacity for empathy, care and social change.

Supervisor

• Holly Rogers
• Iris Garrelfs

This study asks what is the nature of the transformation that takes place to a work of music composed several centuries ago when it is performed by present-day musicians to a present-day audience. It compares the process by which historians recreate the story of the past, actors present the dramas of the past or visual artists the look of the past. It considers the extent to which changes over time in the performance style of old music is associated with contemporaneous changes in the image of that music's composer presented in biography or visual art.

Supervisor

• Lauren Redhead

This project explores how all forms of sound contribute to specific representations, information and consequences of communities, national identities, and historical events in video game imaginary soundworlds, and whether game sound affords context for critical reflection during moments of play.

From comparisons between my own autoethnographic self-reflection and existing work on imaginary play and game sound, I propose a new theoretical model called Paracosmic Multimedia which extends and questions previous work on imaginary world (or paracosm) research and video game music research (ludomusicology).

This model reinstates the importance of sound in instances of imaginary play, organises semiotically defined parameters of game sound within open virtual worlds and provides a framework through which current and future researchers can make sense of sonic gameplay experiences by themselves and other players.

Supervisor

• Holly Rogers

Jeremiah’s research focuses on the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, and aims to develop a clearer picture of his stylistic development. To do so, Jeremiah’s work examines Reinhardt via a critical engagement of his socio-cultural milieux, and within the frame of his geo-historical contexts.

Supervisor

• Tom Perchard

Via sound art and experimental composition, I intend to explore, and speculate on, the ontological and phenomenological implications of inhabiting post-electric, post-capitalist landscapes, paying particular attention to speech and language.

Supervisor

• Iris Garrelfs

My project explores music and sound of the ethnic group Karen at Thai-Burmese border. I will do field work in several border towns  in Northwest Thailand. The research mainly focuses on the evolution of Karen music/sound in recent forty years, especially under political disturbance and displacement.

The theoretical frameworks are around Ethnicity/ Identity, Diaspora/Collective Memory and War/conflict. This is a practice-based project. Besides a thesis, I will make an ethnographic film and a portfolio of soundscape composition. The research will combine ethnomusicology, anthropology, and sound studies.  

Supervisor

• Barley Norton
• John Drever

My research focuses on the utilisation of computer networks in music-making. It aims to find out how the real time, event-driven computer systems can evolve processes of music composition and performance, and thereby lead to authentic musical aesthetics.

Supervisor

• Roger Redgate

This practice-based research investigates the role of musical notations as an art form and future language in response to the ongoing ecological crisis.

Situated at the intersection of acoustic ecology, semiotics, musicology, and visual art, it develops the original concept of ‘Ecosound Notation’ to represent and analyse the soundscapes of wetlands affected by industrialisation.

The project repositions musical notation within a non-anthropocentric framework, expanding its capacity to understand human and non-human interactions and foster sustainable coexistence.

Drawing on firsthand experiences in the Yellow River Delta Wetlands and Walthamstow Wetlands, the research integrates field research, ethnographic approaches, archival exploration, participatory experiments, interdisciplinary creation, and site-specific performances to offer practical toolkits for intervention and new academic insights. 

Supervisors

• Holly Rogers
• Sophie Seita

Website

• liangchensui.com