Research and Innovation Associate – Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (2027-2029)
Composer-researcher on UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship funded project, Sonic heritage and environmental change on England’s East Coast, 1718-present. Generating new insights into Imogen Holst’s work on Medieval music, producing a significant new electroacoustic, multimedia composition to be premiered at Aldeburgh Festival.
Project Lead – Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (2025-2026)
Researcher and Project Lead for Resonant Archaeologies: VR, Interactive Media, and Studio-mediated Bass Viol Performance as Tools for Re-embodied Musical Experience. This project explores how music can be made and experienced in ways that reconnect the listener with the physical presence of sound. In contemporary digital culture, music is often mediated through screens and streaming platforms, where sound is standardised and abstract, removing the sense of the body and space from the listening experience. This project challenges that by combining historical instrument practice with modern interactive media. At its heart is a 30-minute microtonal composition for three bass viols – an instrument with a rich, tactile history rooted in unequal temperaments and resonant, physical sound production. This spectral composition explores the rich resonance of the overtone series (a counter to equal temperaments ‘flatness’). Composer Dr Benjamin Tassie and creative technologist Sophie Hedderwick will work with leading viol specialist Dr Liam Byrne to record and film performances in the studio, exploring how the liveness and physicality of the viol can be captured and conveyed digitally. The recordings will be mixed in immersive binaural audio and a Dolby Atmos format, allowing listeners to experience the music in 3D, spatially navigating the sound with compatible headphones. Likewise, the 360-degree video footage will be developed into an interactive 3D film, where audiences can move within the performance visually and aurally via web browsers or VR headsets. The project will produce new artistic outputs and develop methods for combining historical performance, studio practice, and immersive technology. It aims to create a more embodied listening experience, demonstrating how digital media can restore physical presence, resonance, and interactivity in contemporary music, and offering audiences a novel way to engage with sound, space, and gesture.
Resident Researcher – Guildhall School of Music and Drama (2024-2025)
Designed and delivered research project ‘The Augmented Harpsichord’ as part of competitive Research Residency scheme. Investigated the technological augmentation of a virginal using Arduino circuits, sensors (FSRs, potentiometers, webcams), Max for Live, and Ableton Live.
Research Contributor (Commissioned Artist) – Royal Holloway, University of London (2021-2024)
Composer-researcher on UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship funded research project, Cyborg Soloists. Investigated the technological augmentation of historical organs using novel studio and performance technologies including the ROLI Seaboard Rise 2 MPE keyboard.
Doctoral Researcher – Birmingham Conservatoire (2020-2024) ‘Renaissance Synthesisers: New Frameworks for Composition and Performance with Early Music Instruments’.
Situated within the emergent post-HIP scene, the project used research practice to approach the questions: what new compositional and performance vocabularies arise from experimentation with Early Music instruments, creative technologies, and mixed or digital media, and how does this practice relate and contribute to broader cultural frameworks? Objects of study included Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque musical instruments (including modern copies and originals held in museum collections), as well as new studio and performance technologies, film, and recorded media. Creative practice was the primary means of research while exegetic reflection then drew on ideas from musicology, historiography, philosophy, and sociology to refine an understanding of the meanings of that practice. In particular, the project explored the relationship between post-HIP and issues of post-postmodernity.
The project was completed under the supervision of Professor Joe Cutler, Professor Jamie Savan, and Dr Andrew Hamilton and was examined by Professor Christopher Fox and Dr Ed Bennett in 2024. It was funded by the UKLRI Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.
