Composing Ecology

Durham University Research Impact Fund

Dr James Weeks and Dr Eric Egan

Composing Ecology is a creative, participatory project devised by Dr James Weeks in collaboration with Dr Eric Egan, based on their own research in ecological-based composition. The primary aim is to enhance and deepen participants’ relationship and engagement with the natural environment around them through its sound: both through listening to and recording the sounds of local habitats, and through engaging with creative musical tasks and performances of new participatory compositions by Weeks (’New Nature Pieces’) and Egan (‘woodshadows’).

We are collaborating with a range of partner organisations including mental health support providers - ARCH Recovery College (Durham) and ReCoCo (Newcastle) - music and arts promoters - The Glasshouse International Centre for Music (Gateshead), Swaledale Festival, Creativity Works (Durham), MUSICON (Durham) and MIMA (Middlesbrough) - and schools (St Leonard’s Catholic Comprehensive School, Durham).

Compositions can be freely downloaded from the project website, www.composingecology.com.

Instagram: @Composing Ecology

The Japanese Empire's German Art Music, 1910–1945

Leverhulme Trust

Dr Amanda Hsieh

The Japanese Empire’s German Art Music, 1910–1945’ interrogates the connection between Western – specifically German – art music (colloquially called ‘classical music’) and Japanese empire-building. It does so by examining five key musicians’ activities in the Japanese imperial metropole, in Japan’s first colony Taiwan, and in Germany. Both Japan and Germany were imperial latecomers that reshaped early twentieth-century colonial history – a process in which art played a surprisingly vital role. This project’s resulting book will demonstrate the role that music and musical cultures played in shaping national, transnational, and transimperial political developments across two major powers in the twentieth century.

The Inner Music and Wellbeing Network

AHRC Standard Grant

Professor Kelly Jakubowski

The Inner Music and Wellbeing Network is an AHRC-funded research networking grant led by Dr Freya Bailes (University of Leeds, Principal Investigator) and Professor Kelly Jakubowski (Durham University, Co-Investigator). The project brings together researchers and practitioners from across arts, humanities, social sciences, and medical sciences to share knowledge and develop new interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of inner music (the mentally generated representation of musical sound) and wellbeing. Common interests that have emerged across the group to date include, but are not limited to: inner music for emotion regulation, uses of inner music for rehabilitation, inner music and sleep, clinical manifestations of inner music, and inner music and creativity.

See the project website for more details and opportunities to contribute to ongoing initiatives: https://musicinmyhead.org/

Musical Evoked Imaginings in Synaesthetic and Non Synaesthetic Expert Musicians

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship 

Dr Caroline Curwen

Music can evoke vivid imagined scenes, characters and unfolding events, even when no words or explicit storyline are present. This Leverhulme Trust-funded project investigates how music–colour synaesthesia shapes these musically evoked narrative imaginings in expert musicians.

The study compares musicians with and without music–colour synaesthesia to examine whether involuntary experiences of colour, shape, texture and movement influence the vividness and structure of imagined narratives, the way listeners divide music into meaningful events, and how closely their responses correspond with changes in musical tension and structure.

Participants complete a series of listening tasks involving continuous tension ratings, spoken descriptions of their thoughts and imaginings, and the marking of significant moments in film and media music. Bringing together music psychology, synaesthesia research and event-segmentation theory, the project aims to clarify how cross-sensory experiences may help organise musical imagination as it unfolds over time.

Using music to investigate perceptual and cognitive constraints on imagination

Leverhulme Trust

Professor Kelly Jakubowski

This Leverhulme Research Project Grant is led by Professor Kelly Jakubowski (Durham University, Principal Investigator) and Professor Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis (Princeton University, Co-Investigator). This project aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the thoughts that listeners sustain during music. It surveys the broad range of mental experiences of music listeners, from mental imagery and sensations to personal memories and stories, and unpacks why certain music evokes particular types of mental experiences. It also undertakes a detailed analysis of the content of music-evoked thoughts, with the aim of establishing a new framework for how music-, listener-, and context-related factors systematically influence rich, open-ended descriptions of listeners' inner worlds.

Outputs from this project can be explored further here: https://musicscience.net/research/music-imagination/

Centre for Research into Inner Experience (CRIE)

Durham Strategic Research Fund

Professor Kelly Jakubowski

Durham's Centre for Research into Inner Experience (CRIE) has received a major investment through Durham University's Strategic Research Fund. The project is co-led by Professor Kelly Jakubowski (Music Department) and Professor Charles Fernyhough (Psychology Department). This investment will enable the Centre to fill strategic gaps by appointing new academic staff in the Music, Psychology, Philosophy, and Computer Science departments, as well as a Centre Manager. CRIE takes a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to studying the inner worlds of human beings and non-human intelligences, driven by approaches and insights from the arts and humanities as much as by current scientific techniques. This project aims to establish Durham as the home of the first sustainable world-class centre of excellence in the interdisciplinary study of inner experience, generating research income through funding bids, educational offers, investment from private-sector organisations and partnerships with the creative and tech industries.

The Centre website can be explored here: https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/centre-for-research-into-inner-experience/