![A music lover's desk - a turntable with a vinyl record, over the ear headphones, a cassette, some books and a half drunk black coffee](https://www.mmu.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/page_header_half/public/2022-02/649261834.jpg?h=4be160bb&itok=51QUFbTT)
Research group: Music and Sonic Studies Manchester
Understanding how music and sound help shape our world and communities and make us who we are.
About
About our research
We explore the musical beats and the sonic streets of Manchester and beyond.
Our research interests focus on how music and sound shape our identity, communities, spaces and understanding of the world. We do this by looking at how they are produced and received. And we consider the mindset and social influences behind their composition.
Our work involves lecturers and researchers from across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, from human geography to fashion. This gives us unique insights and new areas to explore.
We aim to engage and inspire through our innovative research by:
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linking Manchester to other metropolitan areas across the globe through sound and music, supporting the city’s renowned music culture and night time economy
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working with youth organisations, schools, archives, and museums across the region and internationally
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running practice-led research and projects that support social change
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hosting a monthly free lecture series with international speakers, including musicologists, DJs and historians.
Research themes and experience
Our research has four main themes:
- archives, heritage, and digital developments
- borderlands and mobilities
- DIY music cultures
- sonic spaces and places
We have particular experience in:
- popular music cultures and sub-cultures
- placemaking
- music cities
- social movements and protest
- gender and music worlds
- digital and transnational music collaborations
- social network analysis
- the intersection of landscape and sound
- haunting sounds and spaces
- music and the occult
- race, gender and pop music fandom
- the links between gothic literature and music
- sound in gothic writing
- the intersections between modernist writing and sonic cultures
- the sound-image-space relationship
- sound and teaching
- hybrid and peripheral spaces, music and sound archives and heritage
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Selected publications and performances
Selected publications
- Arnold, G, Cookney, D, Fairclough, K, and Goddard, MN (2017) Music/Video - Histories, Aesthetics, Media Bloomsbury Publishing USA
- Fairclough, K (2020) Rare Bird: Susan Rogers, Prince and Gendered Music Production in Hepworth-Sawyer, R, Hodgson, J, King, L and Marrington, M (eds) Gender in Music Production, CRC Press
- Fenemore, M (2007) Sex, thugs and rock ‘n’ roll: Teenage rebels in cold-war East Germany Berghahn Books
- Fife, K (forthcoming) Working With/In: An Exploration of Queer Punk Time and Space in Collaborative Archival Workshops in Way, L and Grimes, M (eds) Punk Passages: Punk, Ageing and Time. Intellect, Bristol
- Fife, K (2019) Not for you? Ethical implications of archiving self-publishing Punk and Post-Punk Journal, 8(2), pp 227–242
- Foley, M (2018) Towards an Acoustics of Literary Horror in The Palgrave Handbook to Horror, Corstorphine, E and Kremmel,L (eds), Palgrave, New York, pp 457-468
- Foley, M (2016) My voice shall ring in your ears: the acousmatic voice and the timbral sublime in the Gothic Romance, Horror Studies, 7 (2), pp 173-188
- Holloway, J (2017) Resounding the landscape: the sonic impress of and the story of Eyam, plague village Landscape Research, 42(6), pp 601-615
- McDonnell, B (2020) Teaching Photography via Photography, International Journal of Management and Applied Research, 7(3), pp 267-282 See also performances/exhibition/residencies
- Milestone, K (2018) Swinging Regions: Young Women and Club Culture in 1960s Manchester Film, Fashion and consumption, 7 (2). pp 179-194
- Milestone, K, (2018) Madchester in Sounds of the City: Volume 2, in Lashua, B, Wagg, S, Spracklen, K and Yavuz, MS (eds) Palgrave Macmillan
- O’Shea, S (forthcoming) Take me to Church. Developing music worlds through the creative peripheral placemaking and programming of other voices, in Bennett, Cashman, Green and Lewandowski (eds) Popular Music Scenes: A Regional and Rural Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan
- O’Shea, S (2020) Activate, collaborate, participate: The network revolutions of riot grrrl-affiliated music worlds Punk and Post Punk, 9(2) pp 309–325
- Peter, B (in print) Missing the beat: History, heritage and hip hop in Manchester, UK. Interrogating Popular Music and the City. New York and London: Routledge
- Peter, B (2019) Experiential knowledge: Dance as source for popular music historiography Popular Music History
- Stevenson, A and Holloway, J (2017) Getting participants’ voices heard: using mobile, participant led, sound‐based methods to explore place‐making Area, 49(1) pp 85-93
Performances, exhibitions and recordings
- Katie Chatburn Released albums
- Markus Hetheier Archive of live performances and interdisciplinary projects
- Jamie Birkett Project Low Four Studio
- Richard Kelly Interactive collaboration with illustrator Emma Evans
Organisations we work with
![Logo of the Manchester Digital Music Archive](/sites/default/files/styles/logo_scalable/public/2021-12/Manchester%20Digital%20Music%20Archive.png?itok=XVfmJ3MV)
Manchester Digital Music Archive
![Logo of In Place of War](/sites/default/files/styles/logo_scalable/public/2022-02/IPOW_Logo_BLUE_RGB.jpg?itok=aKHnxuuV)
In Place of War
![Logo of Contact Theatre](/sites/default/files/styles/logo_scalable/public/2021-12/Contact%20Theatre.png?itok=cPfTGRjr)
Contact Theatre
![Logo of the Royal Northern College of Music](/sites/default/files/styles/logo_scalable/public/2021-12/Royal%20Northern%20College%20of%20Music.png?itok=dDlEVJVG)
Royal Northern College of Music
Contact
Contact us
You can contact individual members of the team through their staff profiles.
For general enquiries, please contact our research group leads Dr Susan O’Shea and Dr Beate Peter.