Research and innovation

School celebrates success at REF 2021

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School of Music pianos in the Clothworkers Centenary Concert Hall. The piano and seat are positioned in front of blue velvet drapes.
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Our research

With over 100 years of research activity, we bring together scholars, performers, and composers.

The quality of our research, and the funding it attracts, means we’re able to invest in excellent facilities and academic staff who are actively engaged in research.

Our four research clusters provide a creative academic context for postgraduate research supervision, collaborative research and impact building, representing key themes within our research: Music as Culture; Making Music; Music, Science and Technology and Pedagogic Research.

Research themes

Research in the School of Music is clustered around four research themes, each of which is represented by a research group.

Our research explores a rich variety of musicology from the seventeenth century to the present day.

More on Music as Culture

Our research investigates areas including musical imagery, creativity, preferences, audiences, development, identity and listening behaviours.

More on Music, Science and Technology

The work of our composers embraces acoustic, electronic and computer composition, and engages with multi-disciplinary approaches to creativity.

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We pursue research which seeks to advance understanding of teaching and learning processes, experiences and contexts in music.

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Impact and Engagement

We produce individual, interdisciplinary and collaborative research that generates impact in a broad range of real-world, academic and non-academic contexts.

Our research explores the interaction of music with people, cultures and technologies and seeks to advocate for the historic and continued significance of music in society.

Our work, at local, national and global scale, supports a variety of cultural, social, educational and charitable organisations and we are committed to bringing benefit to those with whom we collaborate.

In addition to opportunities for engagement presented by our ongoing research projects, we offer extensive public engagement opportunities through our Music Research Colloquia and International Concert Series programmes.