I have been pinching myself since the start of last week. I have secured funding via the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Midlands4Cities) to carry out my research to PhD at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. I applied for this funding a year earlier but was unsuccessful, so I studied part-time in the interim, completing my Postgraduate Certificate (PgCert). I found this really challenging but also rewarding and informative, and it sets the tone for where I start/continue my PhD from.

I have used elements of my PgCert submission to indicate where my full-time research embarks. Publishing such early work (and work that wasn’t intended for public consumption) fills me with a certain amount of trepidation but it also serves to frame my planned research and development.

Let’s start with my research title, as it stands…

Inside-out Orchestrions: designing new embodied and reflexive acoustic modular mechanical instruments 

This feels a little clumsy still but it is at least trying to cover all of the aspects of my research in this context. *whispers* Secretly, feedback instruments are also part of what I am researching but I am not yet clear how these fit with my wider research.

One of the challenges I encountered early on in my PgCert was how to show my practice-based research in a suitable manner. Writing about my musical instrument design process without presenting any opportunity to hear or see the results seemed unsatisfactory. So, unusually, I submitted two videos. I believe people have been known to submit videos for Element Two, which covers how they have developed as a researcher, but that it is not commonplace for Element One, which covers the research findings, context and methodology. Looking back at this video now, alongside the text-based submission, I see it as setting my initial trajectory as I switch to a full-time mode of study.

PgCert – Element One – Extended Research Proposal

I am currently revisiting all of my PgCert submission but aspects of my extended research proposal are, of course, highly pertinent. Here are some of the themes explored in this.

  • Expressivity
  • Agency
  • Hyper-virtuosity
  • Visual and sonic embodiment
  • Modularity

In the unlikely event anyone would like to read this in full, give me a shout. These are mostly quite common themes in the field of mechanical musical instrument design. I seek to address much of this through:

…placing (a) human player(s) into my machines. By doing so, my work seeks to include expressive playing and aesthetic choices at system level, through an integral collaboration between human and machine. 

As outlined in the video above, this leads to design choices that open machine-based instruments and sounding elements up to real-time manipulation.

The extent to which I strive to embed a modular design approach (including adopting a modular synth approach with ams) is one thing that tends to distinguish my work. I like to think of the musical instruments I create in these terms, to the nth degree. To me, this opens up an unusually flexible, maybe even unsentimental, way of looking at musical instruments, as sound making devices, which helps me to explore them in greater depth.

I wanted to mark this point in my PhD with this blog post, if nothing else so I can write a ‘How it’s going’ blog post further down the line. I’ll be publishing my research findings on this website and via my Twitter, mainly. I’d love for this to spark intrigue and debate, so please do get in touch if you have any thoughts or comments. Thanks for reading!