Current and past doctoral students in Music
Hannah Baxter, Daniel Alexander Hignell, Daniel Ploeger
Hannah Baxter, Stravinsky's Effect on the Role of the Ballet Conductor.
My research uses a combination of score analysis, historicism, performance analysis and aesthetics to assess Stravinsky's effect on the role of the conductor. Stravinsky is widely regarded as the most influential composer of the Twentieth Century, and this 'mythic' impact is perceived by many to have transformed the conductor's work. I investigate how true this assumption is, and what composers he has overshadowed. My case studies are ballets, which also places spotlight on an often neglected genre in music, and allows the consideration of choreography - an additional influencing factor that is bypassed in most musicological and conducting literature. My hope is that the practical stance I have adopted will make the research accessible and of interest to conductors as well as musicologists.
Daniel Alexander Hignell, Compositional practises for a better world: sounding, being, and the common good.
It is my aim to discover what relationships lie between the sound object and the sound receiver, and what effect, if any, the playing out of these relationships has on wider society. Examining the role of listening as a phenomenological path to understanding, I will research the relationship between ‘sounding’ and ‘being’, with a view to discovering what the sound environment can tell us about the individual, the other, and the common ground that they both inhabit. Understanding that art can ‘build a bridge between perception and communication’ (Luhmann, 2000), and that sound, via its universality, ‘compels us to locate common ground in the most basic of our biological needs’ (Kiezer, 2010), I will look at what sonic problems, local and global, are caused by the contemporary social system, and seek out compositional solutions (particularly in the areas of immersion and field recording due to their close relationship with being) that can be offered by the composer.
Daniel Ploeger , Sonic Bodies in Digital Performance: hypermediacy and spatial presence: a theoretical and practical research project on the sonic representation of human bodies in multimedia art.
From the mid-1990s, sensor interfaces for personal computers have become available to artists at relatively low cost. Since then, a substantial amount of research has been done into the use of biometric data for sound synthesis. However, this research has almost exclusively been concerned with technical innovations and has rarely addressed issues of presence and the politics of the technologized body in performance art. Correspondingly, most performance art based on the sonification of biometric signals has primarily been focused on creating original sonic material, rather than thematizing the relationship between the employed technology and the performing body . My research project is aimed at connecting recent technical research on body sonification in digital art with current debates in media theory and posthumanism, specifically with discourses on changing understandings of the concept of 'presence' within mediatized environments. Accordingly, the project is aimed at the analysis and development of artistic approaches to body sonification that draw attention to hypermediate interactions between the visceral body and technological extensions, and, within this context, instrumentalize different methods of sound spatialization to explore the experience of a sonified body's presence.