SMFA’s Richard Lightman  – Lecturer in Music, Director of Recruitment and Admissions, Director of Employability and Year in Industry Placement Coordinator  – will be on BBC Radio Kent’s The Conversation with Dominic King on Monday 30 April at 6.25pm – playing a rather unusual shovel guitar on-air. Don’t miss it!

On Friday 25^th May at 5.30pm in the Royal Dockyard Church, the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent, Medway is delighted to present an exchange concert (the second in the series) between Greenwich University and SMFA students.  It will involve multi-channel electroacoustic compositions of spatial sound and audiovisual works by students.

Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre (MAAST) is a portable and flexible sound diffusion system designed for the performance of electroacoustic music and research in spatial sound.

The system comprises a custom-made 32-channel Gluion console, two MOTU audio interfaces, an array of Genelec loudspeakers which include sixteen bi-amplified 8020s, twenty 8040s, four tri-amplified 1038s, 7060B and 7070A subwoofers, and custom-made loudspeaker stands that can be extended up to 3 metres in height. The console controls the sound diffusion through OSC and Max/MSP. The system allows for diffusion of stereo and multichannel works, and its setup is flexible, depending on the spatial characteristic of concert and sound installation venues.

FREE to attend but booking via Eventbrite.

Dr Ruth Herbert, Lecturer in Music Performance, will perform with her trio Table Music at Schott Music, London on Friday 2 March 7.30pm – 9.30pm. They are joined by renowned jazz pianist Tim Richards and Ruth’s daughter Asha Parkinson (BBC Young Jazz Musician Award semi-finalist 2016) on soprano sax for an evening of music featuring contemporary, jazz and world influences, including commissioned works from Tim and Asha, plus music by Piazzolla and Zimmerli.

Formed early in 2017, and at core a piano trio, Table Music break new ground with a focus on new, recent and 20th century music displaying a rich mix of influences: contemporary classical, jazz and world, sometimes incorporating improvisation and other instruments. An album is planned for 2019.  More info https://www.tablemusic.co.uk/

As a professional pianist, Ruth has performed with various ensembles, notably recording soundtracks for silent films commissioned by the British Film Institute (BFI) with the piano trio Triptych, subsequently touring these works at major venues in the UK and USA (e.g. Barbican and Lincoln Centres).

Academic positions held include Head of Performance Studies at Dartington College of Arts and Lecturer in Music for the Open University. Prior to her appointment at Kent, Ruth held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford.

For concert reservations, ring Schott Music: 0207 534 0710. Tick­ets: £10 (full-time stu­dents £5) https://schottmusiclondon.com/

SMFA Lecturer in Music Performance, Dr Ruth Herbert features in the Routledge Companion to Sounding Art (2017) which contains 36 essays that cover a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to studying sounding art from the fields of musicology, cultural studies, sound design, auditory culture, art history, and philosophy.

Her chapter, Sonic Subjectivities, compares subjective experiences of sounding art with informal everyday multimodal experiences of music – the way individuals customise mundane experience with music. It goes on to consider Experience Design and examine the faculty of imagination as a psychological given and evolutionary adaptation.

For more details go to https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Sounding-Art/Cobussen-Meelberg-Truax/p/book/9781138780613​

A music psychologist and performer, Ruth has diverse research interests in the fields of music in everyday life, music, health and wellbeing, music and consciousness, sonic studies and music education.

She is currently co-editing a volume for Oxford University Press on Music and Consciousness, together with Professor Eric Clarke (Oxford) and Professor David Clarke (Newcastle).  For more info on Ruth go to https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/staff/staff-profiles/musicandaudio/Herbert.html

School of Music and Fine Art Audio Electronics Lecturer, Dr. Sean Williams, was featured on a programme called Radio Controlled on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday February 11^th at 6:45pm with several other academics, talking about early experimental electronic music on West German radio in the 1950s.

Presented by Robert Worby, the programme tells the fascinating story of how post-war West German radio, and modern music, was conscripted to win the cultural cold war, often juggling political, economic and cultural forces outside of their control.

To listen to the programme go to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09r3qjb

Dr. Sean Williams is a researcher with a strong background in music practice. He has released a number of records on various labels in the UK, Europe and the USA, and performs solo and with groups including Grey Area, and the Monosynth Orchestra. For more info go to https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/staff/staff-profiles/musicandaudio/Williams.html