A vibrant and diverse range of research initiatives are in process. In conjunction with his ongoing AHRC-funded project A Sonic Palimpsest: Revisiting Chatham Historic Dockyards, Dr Aki Pasoulas is giving a paper titled, ‘Soundscapes, Identity and Place – Renegotiating Heritage‘ at the BEAST FEaST 2021 conference, University of Birmingham. Dr Pasoulas has also been commissioned to compose an acousmatic piece for the research project Soundlapse, using environmental recordings from wetlands of Chile. The composition will be published and released by Gruenrekorder by the end of 2021.
Two chapters by Dr Ruth Herbert, on the topics of young people’s experiences of music and musical daydreaming will publish shortly. The first will appear in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Musical Cultures (OUP) and the second in an edited volume on Music and Imagery, part of the SEMPRE Studies in the Psychology of Music Series (Routledge). Dr Herbert will be giving a Keynote on the phenomenology of music listening at the University of Innsbruck Listening to Popular Music: Sounds and Practices conference in June. Dr Herbert and Dr Jackie Walduck join Professor Nicola Shaughnessy’s (SoA) AHRC-funded project Playing A/Part: Autistic Girls, Identities and Creativity as Co-I’s this term, to co-facilitate a pilot study on music and movement, the initial findings of which will be presented at the 16th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (special theme: connectivity and diversity in music cognition) in July.
Dr Jackie Walduck’s other projects include Awaiting Diagnosis – Drifting, Dreaming, Waiting, a series of audio-visual works created with and by psychiatric patients at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital; there will be an exhibition in the Atrium at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital from April-June 2021, funded by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Art fund. Dr Walduck is also working on the Medway Sonic Handwashing Experience – a sound trail installed in public access bathrooms around Medway. Fifteen compositions by Dr Walduck, Richard Lightman and others are accessed via QR codes on hand hygiene posters, challenging public health signage aesthetics and augmenting handwashing to a multisensory experience in this project commissioned by Medway Council installed April – July 2021.
Dr Rich Perks is currently co-editing a volume titled 21st Century Guitar: Evolutions and Augmentations. (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming 2022). He has contributed chapter on David Gilmour to an edited volume: Pink Floyd: Tear Down The Wall: An Interdisciplinary Interrogation of the Music and Significance of Pink Floyd (Routledge), an article on Music-Cultural Hybridity (Music & Practice, vol 9, (forthcoming) and recently gave a paper titled, ‘‘Outlier’ Taxonomies and Codifications of Jazz Guitar Vocabulary’, at The 21st Century Guitar Conference, University NOVA de Lisbona, Portugal.
Other Music and Audio Technology staff initiatives include a web audio installation of The Vocal Constructivists singing Mark Appleby’s Metaphysics of Notation, by Dr Charles Hutchins, in partnership with Trinity College Dublin and Wesleyan University, a recently published chapter on contextual and cultural mediation in the recording studio, by Richard Lightman (Innovation in Music, Routledge, 2020), and a forthcoming article Are We Hostage to the Hook in the Songwriting Studies Journal, jointly authored by Richard Lightman and Anna Neale Widdison.