Research
| IMPRODECO: Improvised music and decolonisation | This project places the history of jazz in Europe, with a particular emphasis on the Netherlands, in the context of (post)coloniality. One objective is to write the under-researched history of postcolonial migrant musicians from Surinam, the Dutch Caribbean, and Indonesia in Dutch jazz, describing how they positioned themselves in relation to jazz and its associated notions of freedom and democracy. A second is to establish to what extent jazz in Europe, and especially free improvisation, has privileged white musicians and aesthetics, and to formulate new conceptions of improvisational freedom and creativity informed by postcolonial critique and decolonial theory. IMPRODECO combines archival work, oral history, and musicological analysis, collaborating directly with musicians and aiming to amplify their voices through public events.
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| EarlyMuse: A New Ecosystem for Early Music Studies | Early music has been foundational to musicology as an academic discipline and continues to play an essential role in the training courses and research programmes of musicologists. Yet challenges abound. EarlyMuse, the first-ever COST Action devoted to a musical scene, aims to take this vibrant field in new directions by strengthening collaborative practices between all stakeholders. Involving more than 250 working group members from 40 countries, the work of EarlyMuse stretches beyond the boundaries of early music, providing models for other musical and cultural movements in need of futureproofing. We hold that rethinking the scientific and experimental terrain, as well as the material and symbolic value of early music and its modes of promotion in the digital age and in the post-pandemic period, offers tremendous opportunities to revalorise and facilitate public access to a major part of European musical heritage.
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| Oper übersetzt: Vom Text zur Bühne | This project seeks to understand opera translation as a performative and embodied, affective practice. It takes as its case study the blossoming culture of imported and translated French operatic works and practices in early nineteenth-century Bayern, when the region dealt with the volatile relationship to (post)Napoleonic France and associated legal and political frameworks. It interrogates how engaging in the reconstruction of and experimentation with corporeal performance practices of opera in combination with archival research deepens and broadens the questions that we can asked of translation practices. The ultimate goal is to understand better how translations function(ed) as sources for negotiating representations of identities and ideas between different cultures.
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| Advances in Speech and Music Technology | This project studies advances in speech and music in the domain of audio signal processing. It studies the basics of speech and music, and then proceeds to computational aspects of speech and music, including music information retrieval and spoken language processing. The project is situated at the intersection in the field of computer science, musicology and speech analysis; it analyses how the multifaceted nature of speech and music information processing requires unique algorithms, systems using sophisticated signal processing, and machine learning techniques that better extract useful information. A deep understanding of both speech and music in terms of perception, emotion, mood, gesture and cognition is essential for successful application. The output is an edited volume (Advances in Speech and Music Technology: Computational Aspects and Applications) that provides both technological knowledge and a comprehensive treatment of essential topics in speech and music processing.
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| Music/Sound through the Lens of Trauma | This project’s aim is to explore the methodological, theoretical and historical questions concerning the intersection between music, sound and trauma in scholarship today. Through a conference, we bring together approaches that have interacted with various fields, such as (not exhaustively) sound studies, social and cultural anthropology, post-colonial studies, disability studies, gender studies, diaspora studies, the history of medicine; and examine the opportunities and responsibilities offered by examining sonic and musical phenomena, practices, and discourses through the lens of trauma. Since 2021, the project is continued as an international and interdisciplinary music/sound/trauma study group that meets twice every year to discuss work and recent developments around these intersectional themes.
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| Music in Comedy Cinema | This international collaborative project tackles the understudied relationship between music and comedy cinema by analysing nature, perception, and function of music from fresh perspectives. Its approach is not only multidisciplinary, but also interdisciplinary in its close examination of how music and the other cinematic devices interact in the creation of comedy. The published volume (The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema) addresses gender representation, national identities, stylistic strategies, and employs inputs from cultural studies, musicology, psychology, cognitivism, semiotics, formal and stylistic film analysis, and psychoanalysis. It is organised along the lines of theoretical investigations, music and comedy within national cinemas, and exemplary case studies of films or authors.
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| Notation Cultures in Contemporary Music | This project investigates the role of different kinds of notation in the performance of music. Rather than viewing notation as standing outside musical reality, this project approaches writing and reading music (in staff notation, tablature, code, braille, or through gesture) as reflecting and constructing musical cultures. Through comparative ethnographic methods, it describes how these notations construct cultural identities, creative interactions between musicians, and ideas about the nature of music itself.
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| Research Study Group Music and Media | This ongoing project under the auspices of the International Musicological Society connects researchers from all over the world to exchange new developments on the multidisciplinary research of music and media. Meetings have been held in Amsterdam, Berlin, Lisbon, Turin, Ottawa, Dijon, Vienna, Stavanger, Tokyo, Salamanca.
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