Music and Sound Recording
School of Arts, Communication and Humanities, University of Surrey, Guildford UK


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Departmental Research Projects


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 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. Papers incorporating some of the results were presented at the York twentieth-century music conference, the 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 in preparation. The project researcher was Dr. Ruth Dockwray, working with Prof. Allan Moore.

 

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), is 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 will be published in early 2008. The project researcher is Dr. Ruth Dockwray, working with Prof. Allan Moore.

 

This twenty-month project is funded by the AHRC to the tune of £160,00 during 2007-08. The purposes of the project develop out of Designing the rock/pop sound box: its aim is to produce a theoretical understanding of how spatial location operates in recordings, in conjunction with an understanding of other analytic domains. It focuses 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 will ask how these signify, probably in terms of theoretical positions developed in ecological psychology, auditory scene analysis, feminism (public and private space), and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The project researcher is Dr. Ruth Dockwray, working with Prof. Allan Moore and Dr. Patricia Schmidt.

 

This project, the first phase of which has been developed by Prof. Allan Moore and Prof. Gianmario Bologna (University of Pavia), aims to increase the level of understanding of musicological work across some of the European languages in which it is published, through series of invited seminars and subsequent publications. The first phase of this project teams six British musicologists with six Italian musicologists, in order to address six areas of current work in musicology, falling within the fields of historiography, the psychology of listening, semiotics, ethnomusicology, sociology and philosophy. The intended output from this phase will be a book which provides evaluative overviews of the work in these areas from the two linguistic perspectives. Participants are Prof. David Clarke (University of Newcastle), Prof. Raffaele Pozzi (Università di Roma 3), Prof. Eric Clarke (University of Oxford), Dr. Angelo Orcalli (Università di Udine), Dr. Giles Hooper (University of Liverpool), Prof. Mario Baroni (Università di Bologna), Dr. Martin Stokes (University of Oxford), Prof. Giovanni Giuriati (Università “La Sapienza”, Roma), Prof. Georgina Born (University of Cambridge), Prof. Michela Garda (Università di Pavia), Prof. Nicholas Cook (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Prof. Fabrizio Della Seta (Università di Pavia).

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