| Degrees |
MusB (Manchester), MSt (Oxon) |
| Course |
DPhil in Music (Musicology) |
| College |
Hertford College |
| Address |
Hertford College
Catte Street
Oxford
OX1 3BW |
Popular music; music and identity; film music; psychology of music; aesthetics; ethnomusicology; popular music criticism.
My thesis, co-supervised by Prof. Gascia Ouzounian and Prof. Eric Clarke, investigates the ways in which the presence of popular artists’ identities can be sonically specified within their recorded works, and how those identities can come into dialogue with the identities of their listeners. This project employs a range of methods to analyse these sonic identities as both processual and reifiable phenomena, including participant interviews, listening diaries, and more ‘traditional’ musical analyses informed by ecological principles of perception. While the record is the main unit of analysis, I also explore the role of multi-medial and para-textual materials in co-forming the artist’s identity, such as artist interviews, (auto)biographies, music videos, and films, to name a few. Artist case studies include Rostam, Janelle Monáe, and Loretta Lynn. The core aims of this research are to assert and elaborate the centrality of personhood in popular music ontologies, and to emphasise the potential of popular music to affect listeners’ own self-hoods in subtle, extensive, and idiosyncratic ways.
Publications
(Forthcoming, with Landon Peck). Autobiographical significance of meaningful musical experiences: reflections on youth and identity [Special Issue]. Music & Science.
AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership
Musical Thought and Scholarship (Film)
Music, Mind and Behaviour
World Jazz
Popular Music (for the Sarah Lawrence Programme)
