Doctoral project 3

This PhD Studentship, funded by the School of Arts & Humanities at King’s College London, is part of the King’s-based project on ‘Shaping Music in Performance’. ‘Shaping Music’ aims to explore how musicians use the notion of shape (and underlying or related perceptions or mechanisms) in preparing, engaging in, and experiencing performances. The studentship is intended to complement the work of the two post-doctoral research assistants who are investigating musicians’ practices, intuitions and beliefs about the role of shape in music, initially by using questionnaires and interviews with professional performers, teachers and students. Later studies will be designed to answer specific questions arising from the results.

Applicants for the PhD studentship have been invited to propose a research project that will feed into the ‘Shaping Music’ project by investigating a closely related question or by bringing other methodologies to bear upon the work of the research team. The research is likely to use empirical approaches from music psychology or music sociology, or may involve the visualisation of music audio or other computational approaches likely to shed light on notions of music as shaped. The emphasis will be on music as performed and as perceived through performance, not on musical compositions or scores.

Areas that have been suggested in early discussions include computer visualisations of music as shaped; studies of listeners’ experience music as shapely; links through physical movement such as dance and the movements made by performers; notions of musical shape used in education; shape as a communicable feature of music; therapeutic uses of musical shape; and sound-shape synaesthesia.

Applications for the studentship close on 1 April 2010.