Current and recent PhD projects

Richard Carey

Supervisors:  Dr Louise Harris, Dr Ross Birrell (Glasgow School of Art)

Circling the Square: A practice-based interrogation of the phenomenological language of audiovisual music.

Through critical and creative responses, my thesis will explore how the language we have available to articulate experience influences sensory acuity in arts situated between the linguistic frameworks of seeing and hearing.

 With particular attention to the psycho-ontological function of language in perception, I will ask: Does the critical vocabulary surrounding the creation and exhibition of audiovisual music divide sensory attention? How can audiovisual composition address the issue through practice?

My practice-based research explores the rhetoric surrounding process and experience in the creation and dissemination of audiovisual music. As an audiovisual composer I create film work that considers both the audio and visual as extensions of the same musical palette, with the heard and the seen forming one sensory, musical whole.

This project will seek to redress this perceptual division by creating non-partisan critical frameworks with a view to expanding phenomenological dialogue in this emergent field of artistic practice. In resisting conventional critical language from the outset, this research will work towards building a new perceptual rhetoric through composition and exhibition. To advance the practical, verbal language surrounding audiovisual music, I will argue that it is fundamental to the research process to also create audiovisual music works that confront the issue, bridging the gap between the intrinsic, artistic language, of the form and the verbal language surrounding it.

 The practical, shared process of collaboratively devising and eventually exhibiting work, allows me to analyse the translation of meaning through non-verbal audiovisual communication. Through workshops, discussions and film projects I have been working with ensembles, artists, community groups, filmmakers, institutions and academics to explore the potential of the research. Public exhibition of the work is central to understanding how this language building process is translated through both performance and context.

Eileen Karmy-Bolton

Supervisors:  Professor Martin Cloonan, Dr Eva Moreda-Rodriguez

Music and labour in Valparaíso (Chile) in the late 19th and mid-20th centuries: from mutualism to unionism

Eileen’s PhD project focuses on early musicians’ organizations in the port city of Valparaíso (Chile), and it indents to illustrate how notions of music as art and/or labour evolved between the 1890s and the 1930s in the Latin American context, responding to political and economic developments in the local, national and international spheres.

Aaron McGregor

Supervisors: Dr David McGuinness, Professor John Butt

Fiddlers, fillocks and others of that band: the violin in Scotland from its beginnings to 1750

My doctoral research investigates evidence of an earlier history of Scottish violin playing than has previously been explored. Scholars have commonly assumed that the violin arrived in Scotland around 1670, in contrast with England, where it was active from 1540. I am looking into the early place and social functions of Scottish violinists pre-1670 by exploring emerging musical and archival evidence. By 1750, the violin was the most popular musical instrument in Scotland, a distinct national musical style had emerged and a Scottish fiddle idiom had evolved through the interaction of local and imported styles. I am interested in the reasons for this change of circumstances, such as the introduction of public concerts, new areas of patronage and the effect of the political union on Scotland’s musical scene.

Fillocks, fiddlers and others of that band: research blog on the early history of the violin in Scotland.

Dorian Bandy

Supervisors:  Professor John Butt, Dr David Code

Melodic embellishment in Mozart

My research focuses on two parallel projects:

• An exhaustive study of Mozart’s notated melodic embellishments. I am compiling a catalogue in which all notated ornamental figures are sorted according to underlying rhythmic gesture, embellished interval, and melodic context. Because Mozart’s melodies and ornamentation share so many features (i.e. pervasive chromaticism, rhythmic variety, harmonic acceleration), this lexicon is not just a list of ornaments, but, incidentally, a study of Mozart’s melodic vocabulary and structural technique. It is also of great potential use to performers.
• A trenchant examination of the philosophy of historical performance. Current interests include: the intersections of compositional and performative evidence; the effect of performance experience on compositional technique; the role of treatises and other textual sources in understanding past performance styles; intention, intentionality, and meaning in music; Popperian knowledge-creation and the fallacy of induction; memetic theory. My project also (by necessity) defends the notion of authenticity in historical performance and attempts to undermine the ‘work concept’. 

I also maintain an active career as a performer and lecturer.

Recently completed projects:

Iain Findlay-Walsh

Supervisors:  Professor Nick Fells, Dr Martin Parker-Dixon

Sonic Autoethnographies: six records of the listening self

I have been developing sound recording and composing methods as primary means of doing autoethnographic research. This doctoral project is part of an ongoing effort to gain deeper understanding of relations between everyday auditory experience, music production and reception, and selfhood. I feel the complexity of these relations fleetingly as I listen, and have been exploring ways to record and reframe them. My auditory experiences while living in an urban centre in the UK are the shifting subject of this work, which is focussed purposefully on a particular and local personal listening culture. The practice and resulting pieces yield generalisable insights into the related areas of sound art, soundscape composition, record production, and personal listening.

Each composition can be understood as a reflexive self-narrative, which has been generated through processes of recording, collecting, reflecting on, and reordering everyday auditory experiences. The pieces consist of multiple and layered representations of self, and often combine field-recordings with appropriated, found audio in fragmentary collages. Some of the pieces can be understood as idiosyncratic record releases, others as rhetorical soundscape compositions. Each is presented in tension with its reception.