Designing the rock/pop sound-box 1966-72
This one-year project was funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research
Council) to the tune of £44,000 during 2006-07. The purpose of the project
was to develop a typology for the different types of mix observable in
the early years of pop stereo, prior to the adoption of a template (
which we call the diagonal mix) which has become normative across
most of popular music since the early 1970s. The project identified three
earlier types of mix, the triangulated mix, the clustered mix and
the dynamic mix, each of which was further subdivided, and observed
the relationship over the period between these types of mix (and their
decline) with different genres of popular song. A list of the recordings
which constituted the data for the project can be found
here. Papers
incorporating some of the results were presented at the York
twentieth-century music conference, the first CHARM conference, the
Mexico IASPM conference and a popular music conference in Parma, all in
the spring and summer of 2007. Two journal articles are currently in press.
My project researcher was Dr. Ruth Dockwray.
Evidencing transferable skills in music
This short project, undertaken on behalf of the NAMHE (the National Association
for Music in Higher Education) with funding to the tune of £10,000 from
PALATINE (the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Dance, Drama
and Music), was charged with identifying good practice in the delivery
of transferable skills; substantiating the need for music in higher
education through its affordance of transferable skills, which are required
for a wide variety of post-university careers; and identifying ways of
facilitating change and development in certain aspects of the curriculum
in order to promote and enable successful delivery of key transferable skills.
Research methods were based on a questionnaire to the NAMHE membership,
follow-up discussions in some instances, and an extensive review of
literature. The project report was published on both NAMHE and PALATINE
websites in early 2008. My project researcher was Dr. Ruth Dockwray.
The meanings of spatialization in popular music recordings
This twenty-month project was funded by the AHRC to the tune of £160,00
during 2008-09. The purposes of the project developed out of Designing the
rock/pop sound box: its aim was to produce a theoretical understanding of
how spatial location operates in recordings, in conjunction with an
understanding of other analytic domains. It focused on the issue of space
viewed in three specific, mutually interdependent ways: most recordings
imply the inhabiting of a particular kind of virtual spatial area by virtue
of the relative density of sound events, their timbral quality, and the
degree and type of reverberation applied; recordings do not fill their
virtual spatial area uniformly, requiring the construction of a
rudimentary grammar for types of density; spaces appear in a recording
taken with respect to time, often as the absence of sound, rather than
the presence of a lack of sound. The project asked how these signify, in terms
of a rich hermeneutic method which drew from ecological perception, cognitive
modelling, proxemics, auditory scene analysis, persona theory and the
'sound-box'. The project researcher was again Dr. Ruth Dockwray, working with
myself and my colleague Dr. Patricia Schmidt.
The Progect: from Genesis to Re-evaluation
This international project, which began in early 2010, started from the
realisation that within academia, progressive rock is considered to be:
* almost entirely a British development within popular music;
* dominated by a small number of bands (Yes, Pink Floyd, King Crimson,
Jethro Tull, Genesis, Gentle Giant, Soft Machine, perhaps a few others) whose
status has become canonic;
* a form of music predominantly consumed in the United States;
* historically situated between psychedelia and punk (in the early and mid
1970s), and has been effectively dead for a generation.
The aim of The Progect is to argue against, to demonstrate, and to provide
evidence for, the extreme limitation of this view. Contributors to the
project are working with the following five themes:
* addressing the activities and outputs of progressive rock musicians
working outside the UK;
* addressing the work of less visible British musicians during
the 'long '70s';
* addressing the consumption and reception of progressive rock elsewhere
in the world (both in Europe and in continents bordering the western
and southern Pacific);
* addressing the renewed visibility of progressive rock which has taken
place since the early years of the 1990s (and, indeed, its continuation
through the intervening years);
* addressing the assumption that the scope of what 'progressive rock'
encompasses is known, is fully defined, and is complete (and thus
addressing its overlaps with ambient music, with heavy metal, and
with other genres).
The Progect began with a round robin email in early 2010, which
generated expressions of interest from more than 30 academics worldwide. A first conference
was held in late 2014, the proceedings due to appear early in 2016. A second conference
is currently being planned.