21st Century Music Practice

Menu

Virtual Research Centre

This page is not accessible through the website links and is a discussion document to get us thinking.

Overview

The 21st Century Music Practice virtual research centre will continue the network’s existing activities plus PhD student support resources and events, visiting research fellows, temporary collaborative research teams coming together to address specific problems through experimentation, analysis and discussion, national and international lobbying and consultation about practical musical research governance and policy and, of course, a podcast.

The idea of the virtual research centre aims to provide an umbrella structure for a research community that is free of specific institutional ties and is a hub for the C21MP community. It will allow researchers into the practices of 21st century music – including practice research – a communal platform for their research outputs and various mechanisms for collegiate discussion and practical experimentation about relevant research topics. The aim is to collaborate with more methodologically varied scholarly groups (e.g. IASPM, BFE, SEM, RMA, AMS) to allow researchers to simultaneously focus on practice and yet be inclusive of a range of musical traditions, styles and genres. It will also provide resources about methodology and methods for research students and early career researchers engaged in practice research and autoethnography as well as links to examples of good practice. It will start with a six month open-access experiment to assess the value, viability and demand for these resource and then aim to replace volunteer labour with some remuneration system – potentially by putting some of the custom-created content and open access to community participation on a subscription basis (either institutional or individual). However the development of the idea will depend on how much interest and engagement there is and will be determined by the whole community of participants.

The initial proposal for the structure of the centre (and, therefore the website) is as follows:

  • The Podcast – for communication, community building and to summarise and promote new content.
  • Various strands of custom-created content – including the Elements series, presentations by invited Visiting Fellows / Researchers, and online and in-person discussions about C21MP events, provocations suggested through the podcast, and the Research Challenges (see below).
  • A repository of links and documents – using tags and keywords but also getting scholars of all levels to compile ‘playlists’ in specific research areas.
  • PhD Support Materials – an interactive process involving what both students and supervisors think are important.
  • Research Challenges – communal practical experiments aimed at shedding light on particular research problems or questions.
  • People, Culture & Environment – these last three are provisional titles based on the more general research governance principles outlined in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework but would aim to be of international use influencing and informing practice research governance and policy. This first category would be about providing information that participants and policy makers could use to assess the level and scope of participants’ engagement with and contribution to practice research culture.
  • Engagement & Impact – similarly we would provide information about and encourage further connections and engagement with professional / creative practitioners, industry stakeholders and wider, more general audiences.
  • Contribution to Knowledge & Understanding – in addition to individual contributions to research we would also provide information about more community-based and general (e.g. logistical, methodological and policy-based) contributions to knowledge and understanding.

The following sections expand on each of these points in turn but they are proposals and are open for improvement and change.

Podcast

The podcast would be audio only but recorded on Zoom so that expanded versions of the discussions can be put on a YouTube Channel and embedded in the podcast archive on the website. It would be like a magazine program aimed specifically at music academics (primarily practice and vocational) and would-be academics (PGR, PGT and some UG students) – although obviously, general listeners would be welcome. The podcast would be international. It aims to give people a monthly survey of what’s going on in music practice research and to help create a community for them. The main podcast is a discussion / review like any arts or culture magazine program – with three or four guests:

  • A PhD student whose video presentation has been put online
  • An established practitioner / academic whose work relates to the PhD student in some way and would act as a discussant.
  • An established practitioner / academic who has published something recently (a ‘visiting fellow’) and who would create a video presentation to go online.

In addition to being asked questions about their specialism / contribution to content (which should be trailed or put online in advance of the podcast), there would be questions from people who have seen the advance content and contributors could ask each other questions about each others’ work. We would invite reviews of events / conferences / publications (?) and would also issue provocations and research challenges which would produce more content.

  • Planning
    • Who? – One presenter? Plus a team (or person?) researching, selecting and recruiting contributors. Each month there is a PGR/ECR and a ‘visiting fellow’ (could be from the Elements series or elsewhere) who also provide additional video content. Plus there is a discussant who contributes questions to the two other participants but whose main contribution is to trigger an online discussion (on the website and archived there) through either ‘provocations’ or a Research Challenge.
    • When? – Monthly podcasts with the main component in production 3 episodes in advance plus a news section prepared just ahead of the next episode. There would be a planning meeting and a production meeting for each episode.
    • How? – What are the logistical challenges? Who would do what?  How do we provide links to the additional content for the audio-only podcast listeners?
  • Production
    • Technical support for remote contributors – a how-to video for the less technical savvy and sound and video checks ahead of production.
    • Podcast researcher to prepare crib sheet / structural ‘script’
    • Note taking during production to facilitate editing
    • Editing short audio and longer video versions
  • Promotion
    • Aimed at researchers, including PGR and PGT students but also looking at the engaged and thoughtful UG students and interested professional practitioners and vocational educators not engaged in research
    • Creating promotional materials for graduate schools / masters course leaders and general mailing lists
    • Social media campaign for the general public
    • Information campaign for the press and policy makers
  • Archiving
    • Who, where and how?

Custom Video Content

  • Getting Elements authors to create videos that are either summaries or further discussion of their Elements publications.
    • Sam Horlor, Toby Martin and Justin Williams have said a tentative ‘yes’ so far
  • Visiting Fellows / Researchers / PhD students give video presentations of their work
    • Send out a call for proposals
  • Videos of panel discussions and further online comments-based discussion flowing from ‘provocations’ about current research issues and problems and discussions of new research outputs, including the Research Challenges and other practice research projects.
  • Practical Musicology videos – SZT to prepare some.
  • Other approaches to methodology and methods from other invited scholars

A Repository of Link and Documents

Talk to Scott McLaughlin about the JISC repository project ENACT which “works with complex practice and performance-based data” and “are pioneering innovative approaches to curation and enhanced access to complex data and driving technological innovation in AI and associated technologies”. Perhaps we can be involved in a pilot study that goes beyond the two AHRC projects – PRVoices and SPARKLE – towards developing a useful and universal repository system for practice research outputs (and other non-text outputs). Is there EU or other work going on around this?

  • Paul Archbold has provided a list of links to interviews with composers from his time at the IMR
  • UWL composers workshops and email universities asking if they have links to similar interviews or discussions with practitioners that would be useful to researchers.
  • Survey of Practice Research PhDs available in repositories
  • Practice research outputs that are public and linkable
  • Invite students, ECRs and established researchers to compile ‘playlists’ – annotated bibliographies with links or documents – relating to specific topics.

PhD (and ECR) Support

  • An international survey of the types of materials that students would like to see.
  • Ditto for materials that supervisors, graduate schools and ECRs would like to see for either students or staff
  • Online discussion forum about practice research methods that uses tags and keywords for navigation

Research Challenges

Making a plan for what the content should look like. Each Challenge should involve the following:

  • A clear statement of the challenge / problem they are trying to solve / question they are trying to answer and what they expect practice research can contribute to it.
  • Documentation of the experiments / practice and discussion that was undertaken. This can (should?) be edited and if anything important is missing, it should be explained or re-enacted.
  • Discussion by the participants to discuss the contextual and practical new knowledge that they have gained through the process.
  • The Research Challenge should involve multiple researchers and can involve multiple ‘teams’ working in parallel so that the discussion involves multiple and varied perspectives and can therefore be considered peer review.

Making a schedule of future (confirmed and provisional) events:

  • HEI Events
    • Townshend Studio (Using 20th Century Electronic Instruments in the 21st Century)
    • Provisional: SOAS (Cross-cultural musical collaboration), Huddersfield (Immersive audio / Dolby Atmos), Portsmouth (Music for screen and/or games), FSU (Perhaps Opera), Monash (Performance in the Studio / Session Singing), Guildhall (Classical Music Production / Vocal performance)
  • C21MP Events
    • Anthony Meynell in Rye (Recording Practice)
    • KISMIF in Porto (DIY Music)
    • InMusic at Aalborg (Recording or mixing practice)
  • Virtual Events

People, Culture & Environment

What type of evidence can we produce that researchers and students can use to demonstrate to their managers that they:

  • Belong to the research centre
  • Contribute material to the research centre
  • Help to run the research centre

Can we provide links or data that can be used as evidence in research and research environment assessment?

  • Can we set the website up to track the engagement of individuals and institutions if they want it tracked – to show not only that they have joined but also how much their staff and students have engaged with and benefitted from the research centre’s resources – i.e. the HEIs and academics as consumers of the resources the centre creates.
  • Similarly, individuals and institutions can be provided with measures of their contribution to the creation and maintenance of the research centre and its resources i.e. as producers.

Engagement & Impact

Can we also include companies and industry professionals in the engagement and benefit statistics – so, for example, that Huddersfield have approached Dolby to host a research challenge on Atmos / Immersive audio and we could gather qualitative and quantitative data from industry partners about the centre’s connectivity and impact.

The same could be done in relation to national and international policy engagement and impact / engagement that could happen through provocations / discussions with invited guests about both music practice and policy and music practice research policy.

Contribution to Knowledge & Understanding

  • Conferences
    • Looking at innovative ways of running conferences that actually produce new knowledge (and documenting and measuring that process) rather than simply being a platform for presenting it.
  • Research clusters / projects
    • Can we use the research challenges and provocations / discussions as catalysts for extended projects and long-term research clusters – with or without external funding
    • Can we crowd fund projects from a combination of HEIs and industry? Sabbatical time for researchers and PGRs could be framed as fellowships

Website Structure and Design

I like the idea of the Virtual Research Centre using the design trope of the ‘sandbox’ computer game genre involving player choice, an open 3D environment, and non-linear ‘gameplay’ – i.e. ‘walk-through’ and interact. The virtual research centre is a 3D building simulation with various departments that visitors can navigate and access the resources – for example, the repository department has virtual card indexes and library shelves and visitors can search in various ways and be moved to a relevant bookshelf where they can access the video or textual content. The difference being that, for simplicity and speed’s sake, there is a video of the movement rather than a game engine allowing you freedom of movement within a 3D model. It would look 3D because of the videos but the modelling is all embodied in those videos rather than happening ‘live’ in the website. I’ve been filling some of my hours by making a model in Cinema4D and SketchUp and could produce short videos that link between departments e.g. the home page is the building’s foyer and if you clicked on the PhD Support button a video would fly you through the building to that department where you would see various notice boards or screens with different topics and you could navigate to specific videos or documents. Below is an unlisted YouTube video of a rough mock up I have made – although this is just to stimulate ideas.

Scroll to Top