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Arts

With a mixture of established world-leading departments and new schools that are shaking up their fields of research, the arts are a key area of academic activity to which we are wholly committed. The proof of this is right there at the  entrance to our campus, with an arts hub of exceptional new facilities for performance, teaching and research.

Research Environment

The School of Arts provides opportunities for doctoral research across a broad range of interconnected subject areas, including dance, digital arts, film, music, theatre and sound recording. We cater for practice-based and scholarly study within a research environment distinguished by methodological innovation and intellectual pluralism.

Two research weeks held each year include keynote seminars, intensive study groups on current themes in arts research, research skills training and preparation of research outputs (including conference presentations and preparation of publications). In addition, smaller groupings of researchers meet fortnightly during term for debate and discussion. Support for practice-based research is provided by more than 15 studios, rehearsal rooms, a black-box studio and 200-seat theatre, digital media labs, and high-quality recording facilities.

Key Research Areas

  • Twentieth-century concert music
  • Popular, rock, jazz and folk musics
  • Composition and performance
  • Aesthetics and analysis – dance, film, music
  • Critical musicology
  • Dance and music on screen
  • Performance studies and techniques
  • Intermediality and improvisation
  • Laban movement analysis, African dance, dance ethnography
  • Choreographic and somatic practices
  • Film theory and criticism
  • Documentary film and animation
  • Shakespearean drama
  • Phenomenological approaches to performance
  • The Institute of Sound Recording (IoSR)
  • Composition
  • Performing the Archive
  • National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD)
  • The Surrey Documentary Group
  • Musicology

Research centres, groups and practices

Dance, Film and Theatre

Performing the Archive

The Performing the Archive research program has evolved through funded research projects held in partnership with the National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD) – Pioneer Women (2007-2009), Digital Dance Archives (2010-11), Visualising Motion in 3+D (2012) and Contexts, Cultures and Creativity: E-learning in Dance (2011-2013). These  creative and curatorial projects have led to research on modernism, gesture and motion, interactivity in the digital domain, and new archival practices. In particular, the theme rethinks the role and significance of archives as repositories with second lives in the present and the notion of a living archive. This grouping builds upon the unique resources of the Laban Archive housed in the NRCD and the unqiue web platform.

www.surrey.ac.uk/dft/research/projects/archive

National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD)

The NRCD, founded in 1982, is a non-profit national archive and resource provider for dance and movement based in the University Library. The NRCD aims to preserve the nation’s dance heritage and enables, supports and enhances the study and teaching of dance.

www.surrey.ac.uk/nrcd

The Surrey Documentary Group

This research group is concerned with issues dealing with documentation and documentary film that extend beyond film to other modes of documentation in social and scientific research. A strand of this research is concerned with the blurring of genres of representation through techniques such as animation, and the role of documentary film and theatre in activism, such as in relation to the environment. A seminar on Documentary and Intimacy is also being planned

www.surrey.ac.uk/dft/research/projects/surrey

Music

Musicology

Professor Steve Downes has written extensively in areas of Central and Eastern European modernism and is editor of Routledge’s Ideas in the Aesthetics of Music. Dr Barham has a strong reputation in Mahler studies and Dr Chris Mark is well known for his work on twentieth-century British music, particularly that of Benjamin Britten. Together with Professor Moore, he founded the journal Twentieth Century Music. Professor Allan Moore, whose work is world leading in the areas of rock and popular music theory, and is now expanding into repertories and practices which might loosely be termed as ‘folk’. He is series editor of Ashgate’s Library of Essays in Popular Music. Dr Tim Hughes works in areas complementary to Professor Moore, principally African-American music such as soul and rock. Dr Jeremy Barham researches jazz and film music, and is founding editor of an Oxford University Press series of monographs on key jazz recordings.

www.surrey.ac.uk/msr/research/popularmusicandfilm

www.surrey.ac.uk/msr/research/modernist

Composition

Composition research formed a significant part of Surrey’s 2008 RAE submission, the work receiving either a 4* or 3* rating. It was also given special mention in the panel report. Since then, compositional research activity in the Department has increased considerably. Professor Steve Goss, Dr Matthew Sansom, Dr Thomas Armstrong and Dr Milton Mermikides are all full-time staff members and research-active composers. All four have received high-profile international commissions and are involved in collaborative projects. Their various outputs are bound together through theoretical reflection on and investigation of collaborative processes in composition.

Sound Recording/Psychoacoustic Engineering

The Institute of Sound Recording (IoSR)

The Institute of Sound Recording (IoSR) is responsible for world-class research in psychoacoustic engineering and offers postgraduate research-based MPhil and PhD programmes in this area, as well as being home to the world-famous Tonmeister™ BMus undergraduate degree course in Music and Sound Recording. It is interested in human perception of audio quality, primarily of high-fidelity music signals. Using a combination of acoustic measurement and human listening tests, we are exploring the connections between acoustic parameters and perceived timbral and spatial attributes, and also between these perceptual attributes and overall quality and listener preference. Our work combines elements of acoustics, digital signal processing, psychoacoustics (theoretical and experimental), psychology, sound synthesis, software engineering, statistical analysis and user-interface design, with an understanding of the aesthetics of sound and music.

Research Academics - Music and Sound Recording

Research Academics - Dance, Film and Theatre

Career Development

A UK research degree qualifies students for a range of opportunities beyond research and teaching. Support through researcher development, individual mentoring and dedicated seminars enables students to enhance their employability. Our many graduates have been appointed to leading academic positions in the UK and abroad, as well as pursuing their careers further in professional environments.

For me, the core of Surrey is the amazing people it has attracted into my two areas, the Digital World Research Centre and the School of Arts, where I study theatre and performance.

Jocelye Spence
Interdisciplinary PhD, based in the School of Arts and the Digital World Research Centre

I completed my undergraduate degree in Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University, and then an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans.

My studies have always revolved around storytelling of some sort and I found myself working increasingly online. Starting with online editing and a bit of web design, I moved on to instructional design, information architecture, and user experience design.

I first became interested in the University of Surrey when I found out about the Digital World Research Centre and met its director, Professor David Frohlich. When he and Dr Stuart Andrews agreed to supervise my PhD, I knew I had to jump at the opportunity.

I’ve had a number of different types of jobs over the years, some of them very enjoyable and challenging, but I’ve always felt myself drawn back to academia. In academia, the goalposts are always impossibly high, which is both maddening and thrilling.

I would love to fi nd a way to stay in academia and continue researching along the lines I am establishing now. I’m also excited to have another opportunity to teach at university level, something I did for several years back in the States.

For me, the core of Surrey is the amazing people it has attracted into my two areas, the Digital World Research Centre and the School of Arts, where I study theatre and performance alongside a cohort studying dance. I’ve also worked closely with a number of people in sociology, and they have been unfailingly thoughtful and helpful as well. Between dance and sociology, we’ve started a reading group that keeps us connected in spite of our different research focuses.