King's College London

Faculty Member, Music

Professor of Music

About

I'm interested above all in what music communicates through performance and how.

Although a musicologist I draw on recent work in music evolution, perception and cognition in order to make sense of the things performers do to make music expressive. Recent publications deal with vocal style, including portamento (related to infant-directed vocalisation), taking 100 years of Schubert song recordings as data, and with the mechanisms underlying performance style change. My most recent book, on how to study performances using recordings, was recently published online: www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html.

In 2009 I began a project that investigates musicians' perceptions of music in terms of shape, and so I'm especially interested in hearing from people working in visualisation, music/spatial cognition, synaesthesia, vitality affects etc. www.cmpcp.ac.uk/smip.html

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