Research

The University of Manchester has one of the UK's top-rated Music departments for research.

Our diverse research activities comprise five main research areas:

• instrumental and vocal composition;
• electroacoustic composition and interactive media;
• musicology (including popular music studies);
• ethnomusicology;
• performance studies (including jazz studies).

The interests of our academic staff encompass shared themes across these subdisciplines. Many of our researchers work across two or more of these broad fields and also draw on methodologies from cognate disciplines. Our shared interests are brought together in our core research areas, which demonstrate our imaginative, multi-layered and collaborative approaches to exploring key research questions both creatively and intellectually.

We also host a set of research networks, innovation labs and reading groups: some serve as hubs for wider research communities that bring together academics, independent scholars and practitioners, and professionals from the cultural and voluntary sectors.

Performance is an integral part of our research activity, resulting in a distinctive, dynamic fusion of practice-based and theoretical approaches and often involving interdisciplinary collaboration with a wide range of partners across academia, the music profession and the cultural industries.

Our musicology and ethnomusicology staff have particular expertise in early modern music, 19th-century Austro-Germanic music, contemporary music and music analysis. Their exploration of today's musical cultures ranges from traditional vocal polyphony in Corsica and Georgia to post-colonial music in South Asia and its diaspora, and from European and American modernism to contemporary jazz improvisation.

Our composers have research interests that span an exceptionally diverse range of creative approaches. These encompass concert-hall composition and music for film as well as composition for live interactive media and other work that employs the latest electroacoustic technology. Some of our most cutting-edge creative research explores music's interface with contemporary technology through applications involving game audio and artificial intelligence.

Research community

Our research community of academic staff, postdoctoral researchers and postgraduate students provides a lively and inspiring environment for the development of new ideas, new connections and new sounds.

Our large cohort of doctoral (PhD) students has an impressively wide international profile. Our externally funded projects also bring globally leading scholars to Manchester to collaborate with our researchers.

We are heavily involved in networks of interdisciplinary scholarship, working with colleagues interested in music, culture and sound across the university, the city, and in other academic and cultural institutions around the world.

We cultivate strong relationships with our partners in the cultural industries, commercial sector and community, ensuring that our research has real and meaningful impact locally, nationally and internationally. Manchester-based partners with which we work closely on collaborative research projects include Manchester Camerata, English National Opera and Band on the Wall.

Research events

We regularly host major conferences, symposia and workshops, as well as practice-led festivals of new music. These include the biannual festivals of acousmatic music mounted by our own Manchester Theatre in Sound (MANTIS).

Our Thursday research afternoons encompass workshops, masterclasses, research fora and seminars. Held weekly during term-time, these provide an important focal point for the lively and inspiring environment for musical research that we foster here at Manchester.