PhD Studentship
Electroacoustic Music Studies
Institute of Creative Technologies
PhD Studentship in the field of Electroacoustic Music Studies and related to the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS, www.ears.dmu.ac.uk)
Awarded each academic year in:-
Music, Technoloogy and Innovation Research Centre
in collaboration with the Institute of Creative Technologies
De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

A three-year PhD studentship is available in the area of electroacoustic music studies. This is funded by the Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT, www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk), a new initiative involving the Faculties of Humanities, Art and Design and Computer Science and Engineering and will be hosted by the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre (MTI, www.mti.dmu.ac.uk) at De Montfort University in association with Knowledge Media Design group (kmd.dmu.ac.uk). The PhD student will be working on the latest phase of the EARS project, one specifically focused on pedagogical research involving new technologies.

Until recently the EARS project has focused on the creation of its current site. It offers an up to date collection of definitions of words (over 500 currently) related to electroacoustic music and its related field of studies, a structured index which can be used to search for resources located in the bibliographic section of the site (over 3000 currently). EARS has recently become multilingual and a publisher in its own right. EARS has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and by UNESCO. It is an internationally known research tool within the electroacoustic music community.

Alongside the continuation of the current site's development, the EARS project will now evolve to include more pedagogical aspects to widen access to this corpus of music and its related scholarship. ‘Pedagogical EARS' will combine elements related to music appreciation (the MTI's ongoing Intention/Reception project), creativity (new software developments, in particular the Sound Organiser project) and the understanding of concepts related to electroacoustic music making and associated research, EARS II which is the proposed PhD research goal.

EARS II will focus on a subset of the terms on the current EARS site. Entry-level definitions for these terms will be sought, hyperlinks to important sites concentrating on these subjects will be included, sound, image and movie examples included where appropriate and interactive media applications provided to allow users of all ages, but particularly from 10 years of age onwards, the opportunity to apply concepts in real time. In other words, an understanding of electroacoustic music, new media tools and web-based computing are all essential aspects to EARS II. The aim will be to integrate this information into a structured learning environment that is directly linked with the Intention/Reception methodology and its related examples as well as the project's user-friendly software which applies a strategy similar to that of computer games in terms of skills development.

This PhD student will form part of an interdisciplinary team evolving the Pedagogical EARS package. (S)He will combine pedagogy with music comprehension and new media design in developing EARS II thus creating a didactic foundation for acquiring knowledge in the various interdisciplinary building blocks related to electroacoustic music. The student will be supervised by Leigh Landy, Director of the MTI and of the EARS project and by Stephen Brown of the KMD and will be based at the MTI's Research Laboratory.

Applications should include a CV, two references and a covering letter. Application forms and further details are available from Rebekah Harriman (rharriman@smu.ac.uk )

Applications should be sent to:
Rebekah Harriman (rharriman@dmu.ac.uk )