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Centre for Electronic Music

College of Arts and Law

The Centre for Electronic Music, established in 2024, brings together research staff and students at the University of Birmingham studying and creating electronic music.

We explore the cultures, practices, and forms of electronic music from across a range of genres and disciplines, including composition and practice-based research, ethnomusicology, history, sound studies, digital methods, philosophy, and psychology. Through this interdisciplinary work as well as through our focus on community engagement, we situate our work within the recent emergence of Transformative Humanities.

Birmingham is a city with a rich history of electronic music. Our vision is to engage with Birmingham's local communities and creative industries, to exchange knowledge, and to document its practices as both local history and global electronic music heritage.

We recognize that electronic music has emerged from a diversity of social and cultural contexts; for example, queer, trans, Black & Global Majority communities have played key roles in the origins and development of electronic music––especially outside of elite institutions. For us, the transformative humanities means envisaging a more just relationship with the peoples and cultures that we study. The Centre is thus committed to reflecting and promoting electronic music’s diversity across our research, events, and collaborations.

The Centre's activities focus on the research, production, and performance of electroacoustic and electronic music, supported by equipment and facilities devoted to sound diffusion, sound synthesis, and DJ performance (see Facilities below). In particular, research into spatialised sound diffusion has been a longstanding tradition at this University, centred around BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre, est. 1982), a large multi-channel loudspeaker system supported by a team of researchers, technicians, and students. The BEAST's activities range in scale from intimate workshops to international festivals (such as BEASTFEaST).

As part of our work, we regularly put on electronic music events and workshops at our state-of-the art spaces at the university and local venues across Birmingham, including the Bramall Music Building, Centrala and Pan—Pan. 

Objectives

The Centre seeks to:

  • Foster a radically interdisciplinary environment for staff and students at the University of Birmingham working on electronic music.
  • Engage with local communities and creative industries in Birmingham to exchange knowledge and practices and collaborate on researching and making electronic music.
  • Foster international networks and collaborations to deepen the understanding of electronic music as global heritage.
  • Reflect and promote the culturally diverse history of electronic music, including in its research, practices, participants and audiences.

Academic staff

Students and Postdoctoral fellows

Tamara Batty is a PhD Music Candidate at the University of Birmingham, U.K. specialising in the ethnomusicology of Arab music. She has a particular interest in contemporary manifestations of the aesthetic notion of ṭarab in the twenty-first century. Her thesis evaluates ṭarab's resurgence in the fusion genre electro-tarab: a merge of twenty-first century electronic dance music and twentieth century Arab music. This thesis is an interdisciplinary piece with an affective lens looking to propose a new analytical framework for ṭarab analysis in the twenty-first century in response to new, emergent genres such as electro-tarab. Her research also aims to improve the understanding of ṭarab in twenty-first century contexts, particularly with electro-tarab as a representative example of the Arab popular music scene in diasporic communities.

Valentina Bertolani works on experimental and electronic music, collective improvisation, and physical objects, and immaterial and embodied practices that stem from these experiences. Currently she works on the project “Archiving post-1960s experimental music: Exploring the ontology of music beyond the score-performance dichotomy,” which addresses the theoretical, ontological, methodological and ethical issues that arise from archiving the heterogeneous instruments, objects, electronic devices, software, and custom-built materials that have been at the heart of sonic arts for the past 70 years. This project is supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship that she is carrying out at Carleton University and the University of Birmingham.

Zach Dawson is an experienced composer-performer and researcher undertaking a practice-based PhD in music composition at the University of Birmingham, supported by an AHRC PhD studentship. His practice-based research attempts to deconstruct music’s medium by composing through non-sonic media. Recent output includes; ‘ImageAudio’ (ongoing post-digital event score anthology) initiated in 2024, ‘music to compose music to’ (website), released in 2024, ‘Selling You Dreams’ (video installation) premiered at the Orpheus Institute (BE) in 2023, and ‘Piece X’ (outdoor sound installation) premiered at BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre) FEaST 2022. He writes music under the experimental electronic music duo 7balcony, co-founded the experimental music concert series Post-Paradise Series, and is a Postgraduate Teaching Fellow for the Academic Writing Advisory Service at the University of Birmingham. He is also an editor for Makings, an open-access journal on the cultural and creative industries based at Birmingham City University.

Chelsey Dykes is a PhD Music candidate at the University of Birmingham, U.K. specialising in the musicology of late twentieth-century popular music. She is particularly interested in U.S. Industrial music and its mainstream success in the 1990s. Her thesis delves into the history of Industrial music, narrowing in on 1990s U.S. Industrial music (via a case study on Nine Inch Nails’ 90s output), the music genre’s connection with industrialisation and more broadly, its connection with American history, culture and subcultures. Her research aims to provide a “more than just a name” outlook on the connection between U.S. Industrial music and industrialisation by bringing in affect theory and standardisation.

George Edmondson is a sonic artist, researcher, and composer focused on the potential of sound within ethnography, advocating for its use beyond recording to propose sound as a means for collaborative, reciprocal, and democratised documentation and exhibition. In partnership with communities, his research frequently explores the recontextualisation of sound and its impact on perceptions of space, memory, perspective, and meaning. Edmondson's research and compositions have been presented and disseminated at international concerts and conferences, including SEAMUS in New York, NIME in Auckland, Sonorities in Belfast, and the Spatial Audio Gathering in Leicester.

Marty Fisk is a composer from Gloucester currently studying a PhD in Electroacoustic Composition. His research interests include electroacoustic live performance, novel sound interfacing technologies and interactive works; exploring the dynamics between performer, audience, and sound. His research is being carried out under the supervision of Professor Annie Mahtani and Dr Christopher Haworth, and he also previously completed both his MA and BMus at the University of Birmingham.

Gabin Kim is a violinist and a PhD student at the University of Birmingham. She previously received an M.A. in Music Performance Practice from the University of York with distinction, and a B.Mus. in Violin Performance from Keimyung University (Korea) with a merit-based full scholarship. Her research focuses on violin performance practice in electroacoustic music, with the objective of exploring the violin’s extended possibilities with electronics. The methodology includes incorporating the practice into literature and analysing compositions, among other approaches. In 2023 and 2024, she was selected as a Young Artist by the Arts Council Korea and will perform a recital project titled 'Violin and Electronics' in Seoul. This project aims to introduce electronic music composed for the violin to a wide audience. Along with her current research, she is also interested in areas such as electroacoustic composition and sound studies.

Sam Riley is a PhD student in musicology. His current research studies the cultural politics of late and post-Soviet experimentalism. This history begins in Leningrad in the late 1970s, looking to samizdat reception of free jazz and the post-war avant-garde in order to better understand Soviet discourses of free improvisation. It covers the 1980-90s, following a transnational circulation of Soviet tape collage and the emergence of electronica and rave culture during the Soviet dissolution. It ends in the mid-1990s, turning to multimedia performance art, to speculate on the influences of late Soviet aesthetics on early cybercultures of Eurasian nationalism. Prior to this project, Sam researched live electronic music by looking to the music of David Tudor and the political reception of American experimentalism on the world stage. In addition, he coordinates the EERG with Tamara Batty and Valentina Bertolani.

Jake Williams cut his teeth playing live electronics with the Warp-signed avant-jazz band Red Snapper, as well as creating music and sound design for major TV shows and the occasional well-received techno record.  He currently works as a DJ, producer, researcher, and educator with particular interest in radical creative applications of digital DJ technology. He is completing a practice-based PhD at the University of Birmingham that sits at the intersection of black electronic dance music, soundscape composition, and experimental turntablism. He is also a founder member of the electronic free improv group Spectral Karaoke.

Facilities

Hardware

  • Make Noise Tape Microsound Modular System
  • Buchla Music Easel Synthesizer
  • Arturia Keystep Pro Sequencer
  • Behringer Blue Meanie Synthesizer
  • Organelle M Synthesizer
  • Livenware Texture Lab
  • Technics 1210 Turntables
  • Pioneer XDJ –RX3 CDJ System
  • Native Instruments TRAKTOR Kontrol
  • Allen and Heath Xone 96 Mixer
  • Roland TR8 Drum Machine
  • Behringer TB03 Bass Synthesiser
  • Roland SP404 Sample Player
  • Arturia Keylab
  • Woojer Haptic Vest

Recording Equipment

  • Sound Devices Mix Pre 6 II recorder
  • Eigenmike 64
  • Sennheiser Ambeo
  • Soundfield ST200

Performance Systems

  • BEAST (Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre)
  • Genelec Ambisonic Loudspeaker Dome
  • IKO Ambisonic Speaker

Software

  • Reaper
  • Ableton Live
  • Supercollider
  • Max MSP
  • Sonic Visualiser
  • Traktor
  • Spat Revolution

Research projects

Teaching

We teach several modules in the Department of Music focusing on electronic music research, composition and performance.

  • Electronic Music Studies
  • Sound Studies
  • Studio Composition
  • Sounding Images
  • Sonic Alchemy
  • Advanced Studies in Electroacoustic Composition
  • Composing for the Creative Industries
  • Introduction to Sound Recording
  • Experimental Musics
  • Music as Critical Practice
  • Music Festivals
  • Introduction to Global Popular Music