Calum is currently a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, where he is focusing on the representation of political subtext in the soundtracks of the New Hollywood period. He has previously received a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Popular Music Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. His principal areas of research is film music, having explored thematic and subtextual resonance in narrative film soundtracks in his undergraduate dissertation. His master’s research involved exploring surrealism, postmodernism and narrative dissonance in mainstream film soundtracks. Additionally, Calum has explored topics surrounding music video and its influence on post-classical cinema, aesthetics in film, and political, philosophical and economic issues in popular music, from Taylor Swift to Bruce Springsteen. Before beginning his studies at Goldsmiths, Calum acted as a composer-for-hire, writing scores for interactive theatrical performances and local businesses, as well as a solo singer-songwriter, playing consistently throughout the UK.
Regan Bowering -Co-Editor-in-Chief
Regan Bowering is a current PhD student in the Music department at Goldsmiths University of London, where she also completed her MA (2020) and UG studies (2019). Her current research explores the intersections of popular music history, technology and audiovisual culture, with a particular focus on rhythm in relation to aesthetic and affective experience. Regan is co-editor-in-chief of Sonic Scope – a new student journal on audiovisual culture. In 2020, she was named runner up for the IASPM Andrew Goodwin Memorial Prize. Prior to studying, she worked for 9 years in music events.
Editorial Board
Rachel Heavey - Associate Editor
Rachel Heavey is an artist from Dublin, Ireland. An MMUS Sonic Arts student at Goldsmiths, University of London; she is interested in listening to you: rachelheavey.com
Jay Jolles -Peer Review Editor
Jay is a PhD student in American Studies at The College of William and Mary. His work lives at the intersection of memory, catastrophe, music, and digital culture. In particular, he is interested in the ways that sound, noise, and music relate to and complicate social relationships, time, and space. Jay has written about Taylor Swift and masculinity, lo-fi beats and neoliberalism, and the cultural phenomenon known as ‘vibes’. He is currently at work on a project about platform and surveillance capitalism that takes as its focus the music-streaming service Spotify.
Beatrice Vorster -Editorial Coordinator
Beatrice Vorster is currently doing her MA in Computational Arts at Goldsmiths. She is also an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL).
Cameron Naylor - Production Coordinator
Cameron Naylor is studying an MMus in electroacoustic composition at the University of Manchester. Through the manipulation of field recording and abstract sound material, his compositions explore sound and space as a metaphor in musical storytelling, weaving together the two with the aim to elucidate upon otherwise unheard narratives.
His primary research interests include the semiotic potential of sounds in relation to place in electroacoustic music and sound installations, having worked on several soundscape and radiophonic compositions both in the UK and abroad.
Directors
Holly Rogers - Reader in Music and Audiovisual Media: Goldsmiths, University of London
Holly is Reader in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Before coming to Goldsmiths, she held research fellowships at University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin and a Fulbright Scholarship at the DocFilm Institute in San Francisco. She joined Goldsmiths in 2015 after 6 years as founding director for the Research Center For Audiovisual Research at the University of Liverpool. Holly is interested in the convergence of music with the visual arts and moving image media and is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-author of a textbook on twentieth-century musics (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Her edited collections include Music and Sound in Documentary Film(Routledge, 2014), The Music and Sound of Experimental Film(Oxford University Press, 2017), and Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics(Bloomsbury, 2019). She is a founding editor (with Carol Vernallis and Lisa Perrott) of the Bloomsbury book series New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media.
Atau Tanaka - Professor of Media Computing: Goldsmiths, University of London
Atau conducts research in embodied musical and human-computer interaction. He studied under Ivan Tcherepnin at Harvard and with John Chowning at Stanford University’s CCRMA. His first inspirations came upon meeting John Cage during his Norton Lectures and would go on to re-create Cage’s Variations VII. Atau has carried out research at IRCAM Centre Pompidou, as Artistic Ambassador for Apple France, and as researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) Paris. His performances of muscle interaction in music and networked audiovisual installations have been presented at Ars Electronica, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Eyebeam NYC, Southbank Meltdown London, NTT-ICC Tokyo, and ZKM Karlsruhe. His research has been supported by the European Research Council (ERC), and UK research and arts councils He has been mentor at the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology & Art (NESTA) and was Artistic Co-Director of STEIM in Amsterdam and Edgar Varèse guest professor at TU Berlin. He is Professor of Media Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Reviewers
Anders Aktor Liljedahl is in the final year of his PhD in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies (musicology section) at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. His research explores the discursive relationships between music videos and audiovisual studies, and U.S. Black studies.
Henry Balme is a PhD candidate in music history at Yale University specializing in audiovisual media. His dissertation gives the first comprehensive historical account of visual music, a genre of experimental film. He traces its beginnings in Weimar Germany to its eventual integration into the West Coast counterculture in the United States. Henry also outlines a theoretical framework for understanding these films in terms of intermediality. Films analyzed are by Jordan Belson, Mary Ellen Bute, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Harry Smith, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann, and the Whitney Brothers. Further research interests include music video and VJ culture. In his teaching, Henry focuses on contemporary popular music.
Sophie Benn enjoys a multifaceted career as a musicologist and cellist. A PhD Candidate in musicology at Case Western Reserve University, she studies notation and the performing body in dance and music theory in late nineteenth-century and early modernist aesthetics. She has presented at conferences for the Dance Studies Association, the American Musicological Society, the German Studies Association, the Society for American Music, the International Association of Music Librarians, and numerous graduate-level and regional conferences. She serves as the Chair of the Dance Studies Association’s Music and Dance Working Group. Sophie also maintains an active career as a cellist, specializing in modernist and contemporary repertoire. She is a founding Co-Director of Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project (CUSP), a presenting organization for experimental contemporary musicians and sound artists. Sophie also performs as a baroque cellist, and, drawing on a childhood spent in the ballet studio, has appeared as a baroque dancer in productions of Hippolyte et Aricie, Dido and Aeneas and Acis and Galatea. Sophie is the author of the forthcoming bibliography on the cello for Oxford Bibliographies Online.
Ellie Berry is a PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on the intersections of sound and disability studies, her dissertation considering the sonic resonances and frictions of closed captions in film and media.
Budhaditya Bhattacharyya is a PhD candidate at Durham University researching musical histories between Bengal and Britain, funded by a Durham Doctoral Studentship. Through simultaneous engagement with oral histories, written records, and audiovisual sources like archival video footage and ephemera, his project documents musical lives of the British Bengali diaspora, primarily in the 20th century. Budhaditya is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, with research interests ranging from music history, ethnomusicology, ecomusicology to music iconography and sound studies, broadly in the context of the Indian subcontinent and its diasporas.
As a Hindustani vocalist, composer, and teacher, Budhaditya specialises in khayāl, and has numerous performances to his credit in India and the UK, besides continental Europe, China and Thailand.
Heather Brittonis a multi-instrumentalist, filmmaker and audiovisual composer, working across multiple mediums and genres. She has recently completed her MA in Creative Practice at Goldsmiths, where she produced EROS, an audiovisual album. Current projects include her band Calluna, a psychedelic shoe-gaze collaboration, and Vulgaris, her experimental audiovisual work. Her extended research interests and practice covers a broad range of topics from sound design to video editing, with a special interest in synchresis and incongruousness in audiovisual composition, as well as being a cinephile with a passion for experimental filmmaking. She is on the editorial board for the journal Sonic Scope and lives in Brighton with her pet rabbit, Zissou.
Shelley Calhoun-Scullion is a PhD student in the Music department at Goldsmiths University, and is an artist who works in visual and aural cultures, previously exhibiting work within moving image, video installations and found footage-which she presented under the artist name “Shelley Rae”. Her practice now includes assemblage of pre-existing recorded sounds, real person narratives and music. Shelley’s collaged work represents the fragmentation and invisibility of Michigan’s African-American and immigrant industrial proletariat, through oral histories and cultural sound artefacts. Shelley’s research examines the unseen acts of resistance between socialists and communist workers, labour organisers, black workers, and the resulting culture of prosperity within automotive cities of Detroit and Flint Michigan. She appropriates recorded moments of “infrapolitics” (James C. Scott’s definition of the struggled waged daily by subordinate groups who function beyond the visual spectrum) through curated sound and music samples to bring attention to the dissonant noise of the subversive space of Michigan.
Hugo Craft-Stanley is a Master’s student studying Musicology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Prior to beginning this Master’s degree, he received a First-Class Honours in Music from Goldsmiths in 2019. His present research focuses on the archive of experimental musician and sound poet Lily Greenham, housed in Goldsmiths’ Special Collections, focusing on the difficulty of documenting ephemeral performance moments and exploring the sensory experience of archival objects and sound. He has previously written about contemporary practices of audiovisual self-narration on social media platforms, transmedia and fan participation in popular media franchises, the increasing popularity of musical analysis on YouTube and the role of sound and music in personal and familial memory. As a creative practitioner, Hugo explores songwriting and composition as autobiographical practices and is currently experimenting with sound poetry and free improvisation.
Samiran Culbert is an AHRC Northern Bridge PhD Candidate in Newcastle University’s International Centre for Music Studies (ICMuS) and Media, Culture, and Heritage (MCH) departments. His thesis details the ways in which grieving practices have been changed by social media sites, via the prism of musician’s deaths, particularly through the concepts of narrative, memory, nostalgia, mythology, social media theory, technology studies, and persona. He has previously completed a BA and MA at University of Liverpool’s IPM, where he specialised in popular music history, nostalgia, and the media. He teaches seminars and workshops at Newcastle University on popular culture, new media, and popular music.
Julian Day (Columbia University, School of the Arts.)is an Australian artist, composer and writer based in New York.
Day’s work frames sound as a social and civic practice that reveals hidden power dynamics by stealth. This plays out in individual artworks (performance, sculpture, installation, video, text) and projects such as Super Critical Mass in which temporary communities articulate public spaces with interdependent actions.
Day has presented work in the California Pacific Triennial, Asia Pacific Triennial, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Bang On A Can Marathon, MATA, Spitalfields Music Festival, Jewish Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Fridman Gallery, Institute of Modern Art, Artspace and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Day has presented programs and features on ABC and BBC radio, interviewing such leading figures as Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Christian Wolff and Pauline Oliveros, and has published in Tempo Journal, Leonardo Music Journal, Contemporary Music Review, Runway and Limelight.
Zachary Diaz is a PhD Student in Musicology at the University of Bristol. His doctoral dissertation focuses on the music of the late hip-hop producer J Dilla. He is also a hip-hop producer himself, having released several instrumental hip-hop projects under the Manchester-based record label Beatsupply and Bristol-based label Echo World. His research and lectures focus on hip-hop production, the history of digital sampling, and global beat-making cultures.
Bryan Dunphy is an audiovisual composer, musician and researcher interested in generative approaches to creating audiovisual art. His work explores the interaction of abstract visual shapes, textures and synthesised sounds. He is interested in exploring strategies for creating, mapping and controlling audiovisual material in real time. His background in music has motivated him to gain a better compositional understanding of the combination of audio and visuals. His recent work has explored the implications of immersive experiences on the established language of screen based audiovisual work. He is currently completing his PhD in art and computational technology at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Kaapo Huttunen is from Finland and graduated from the University of Helsinki, with a master's thesis on the music and sound design in contemporary Finnish mainstream cinema. Now, in the University of Turku, he is doing a PhD on the music and sound design in audiovisual Nordic Noir. He also work as a composer, writing music mainly for film and television, but also radio plays, art exhibits, theatre, etc.
Prokhor Kuznetsov is currently an MA student in the Composition of Music for Film and Television at the University of Bristol. Originally from Saint-Petersburg Russia, he received his BMus in Popular Music from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019. In addition to his creative practice as a media composer and songwriter, Prokhor's academic research explores film music and popular song.
James Denis Mc Glynn is a conductor, composer and PhD Excellence Scholar at University College Cork. His research explores pre-existing music and narration in the film score. As an undergraduate, James founded the UCC Orchestra, resulting in his receipt of a coveted Quercus Creative & Performing Arts Scholarship. In 2017, he was invited to design and deliver courses at Tianmu Arts Training Centre (Suzhou, China). Having been awarded a CACSSS PhD Excellence Scholarship at UCC, James undertook a three-month research residency at the Irish Culturel Centre in Paris, during which time he participated in Michel Chion’s 2018 ‘Audio-Vision’ workshops. As a performer, James has worked extensively with the Irish Gamelan Orchestra, performing in the International Gamelan Festival (Central Java, Indonesia) in 2018. Recently, IGO performed the score for Gare St. Lazare’s ‘How It Is (Part 2)’, starring Conor Lovett and Stephen Dillane (Game of Thrones, The Crown). The show begins a 17-show residency at the Coronet Theatre, London [rescheduled due to COVID-19].
James Millea is originally from the Republic of Ireland. He has just been awarded his PhD from the University of Liverpool, where he also spent a number of years as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Music. Funded by the National University of Ireland (NUI), where he became a Travelling Student in Music in 2016, his doctoral research explores the relationship between hip hop music and the narrative film soundscape in New Black Realism, independent Black American cinema of the 1990s. Generally, his research interests sit at the intersection of popular music and audiovisual media. As well as speaking at various conferences and invited talks across Ireland and the UK, James has published his research on both sides of the Atlantic, with his most recent work appearing in the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music (2020).
Lee Scott Newcombe is a sound sculptor, sonic painter, temporal choreographer and instrument inventor. Newcombe attended Dartington College of Arts, receiving a BA(Hons) in Music Composition. During this period, he collaborated in multiple projects, performing extensively across the UK and Europe. Newcombe went on to study at the University of Sussex, completing an MA in Music Composition. He formed two performing groups to present his works: eNSembLe and XPERIMENT/PUBLIK, which went on to win the Brighton Fringe art industry showcase award.
Newcombe currently resides in London, where he is studying for a PhD at Goldsmiths, researching the temporal natures of sound and movement with his own bespoke instruments. He is investigating the concept of 'revolution' in composition and performance and how this differs from repetition through linear sequences resulting in non-linear outcomes.
Pete Jiadong Qiang is currently a PhD candidate in arts and computational technology at Goldsmiths, University of London and trained in architecture at Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA). Pete's work focuses on the specific investigation of the bridges and interstices between pictorial, architectural and game spaces. Pete's works range from architectural drawings, paintings, moving images to augmented reality (AR) drawings, virtual reality (VR) paintings and video games. It forms an idiosyncratic cosmotechnics of research methods. It intra-acts of the physical and virtual spaces with ACGN (Anime, Comic, Game and Novel), fandom and digital ethnographic contexts. Pete Jiadong Qiang is often referred as architectural Maximalism.
Sanna Qvick (M.A.) is a doctoral candidate in musicology at University of Turku (Finland). Her doctoral thesis “Captivating film sounds: Sonic narration and world-making in the soundtracks of Finnish fairy tale films” focuses on the world-making ability of the soundtrack while highlighting its immersion powers. Her research material consists of six Finnish fairy tale films released during a time period over 50 years. Her methodology rests on close reading, narratology, audio-visual and music analysis. The main part of her work has been funded by Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Qvick is part of a research project in Finnish Contemporary Music in the 21st Century: Cultural and Social Significance of Art Music in the Postmodern World (project leader Dr. S. Välimäki, funded by Kone Foundation). Also, she has been a board member of The Finnish Musicological Society (2013–2016).
George Reid is currently a lecturer in (ludo)musicology at Kingston University, London, and his research interests lie primarily in the fields of ludomusicology, music fan and (sub)cultural studies, vital materialist and queer approaches to audiovisual media and music, and the ways in which audiovisual media and music can engender nostalgia. Kingston University also recently awarded him his PhD in musicology, funded by the AHRC. His thesis developed a new framework to analyse the relationship between music and identity in chiptune fan cultures, with specific focus on the ludomusical interactions between the non/human agencies of technology, memory and body, and timbre.
He is currently preparing to publish his thesis with Amsterdam University Press, and he is co-editor of the forthcoming Chiptune Studies Reader with Oxford University Press. Outside his academic work he enjoys composing chiptune, synthpop, soundtracks to 1980s films and retro video games that never existed, and he is also an avid pixel artist.
Jilliene Sellner is a Canadian sound artist and PhD researcher (Goldsmiths) currently based in the UK. She has been field recording and playing with sound since she was a child and podcasting for over a decade. She has an undergraduate degree from Simon Fraser University in Canada and an MFA from UCA in the UK. She has contributed to Tse Tse Fly Middle East and regularly produces episodes for Framework Radio which explore decolonialism and gender in field recording. She has composed sound for several international artists’ video work and provides training for non-profit organisations and activists in podcasting. Her practice concentrates on collaboration, phonography, composing for installation, 'radio' and video and curating/producing live networked performances. Jilliene's research is a practice based co-creation project with female experimental music artists in the Middle East.
Holly Shone is a PhD student currently studying at Bangor University in North Wales, having completed her undergraduate and master's degree at the same institution. Primarily a musicologist, Holly is focusing on the music of Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi to understand the contrasting critical and public reception of his music, along with a detailed analysis of select pieces from his oeuvre. Her wider research interests include the reception of ‘classical’ music amongst adolescents, and contemporary postminimalist music. Alongside her research, Holly is a pianist for a number of student ensembles at Bangor University, as well as participating as an alto in the University Chamber Choir.
Jennifer Smith is a PhD candidate currently in her writing up year at the University of Huddersfield. Her PhD research is a critical analysis of the voice as a worldbuilding tool in role-playing video games, specifically identifying voices as identifiers of video game environments and character characteristics. Her MA by research contributed to the understanding of flow and immersion in indie video game soundtracks, and she has co-hosted and organised an RMA Study Day at the University of Huddersfield entitled 'Constructing the Moving Image: Identity and the Soundtrack'.
Raymond Sookram is a composer, pianist, drummer, writer, associate lecturer and current student in the PhD pathway in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. His present research concerns the simultaneous receptions of video game music and concept of character when experienced by gamers and viewers alike across several media platforms, a phenomenon known as transmedia. Raymond’s academic focus has broadened within and beyond video game music to encompass major popular musical works and political expression in music. Recent research includes examinations on transmedial sound and parody of the Batman franchise within Level 2 of The Simpsons Game and the argument for politicised speech as a form of popular music. Alongside his research, Raymond has released albums which focus on ambient sound textures and the acceptance of mistakes and wrong notes during improvisations.
Luka Stojanovic holds an Honours BA with Specialization in Philosophy from the University of Ottawa (2018) and an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies from the University of Cambridge (2019). His research interests include the environmental humanities, posthumanism, and critical plant studies.
Ellie Berry is a first-year Cinema and Media Studies Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on the intersections of Sound, Technology and Deaf Studies; examining the role of sound and sound technology in representations of Sign language, deafness and tinnitus in mainstream film and television.
