Events
Our Music Research Seminars are hosted by the Department of Performing Arts and SPARC. They bring together world-leading artists, practitioners, and scholars in the broad fields of music and sound. Seminars are open to the public in person and online. Please follow the linked titles below to attend or receive a Zoom link. Future events will be added here: Music Research Seminars.
All seminars take place Wednesdays 17:00-19:00, room AG08, College Building, 280 St. John Street, and online.
Upcoming events
Musical care to support maternal mental health: Discussing the Community Health Intervention through Musical Engagement
(CHIME) project in The Gambia, South Africa, and Lesotho
Music Research Seminar
- , 17:00 – 19:00 ( BST )
- Room AG08, College Building, or online via Zoom
Speaker: Katie Rose Sanfilippo
Podcast Gold - An Evening of British Podcast Award Winners
Awards Ceremony, Centre of Podcasting Excellence
- , 18:30 – 21:00 ( GMT )
- B200 and Pavilion
Join City St George's Centre of Podcasting Excellence to welcome and celebrate the winners of this year's British Podcast Awards.
Creative Health: Using Participatory Arts in Socially Engaged Mental Health Research
Music Research Seminar
- , 17:00 – 19:00 ( GMT )
- Room AG08, College Building, or online via Zoom
Speaker: Jackie Walduck and Ruth Herbert
Understanding REF Impact in Music
Workshop
- , 12:30 – 17:30 ( GMT )
- College Building [A]
'My songs lie unheeded and unknown...’: Fanny Hensel's Lieder in Reparative Practice Research
Music Research Seminar
- , 17:00 – 19:00 ( GMT )
- Room AG08, College Building, or online via Zoom
Speaker: Timothy Parker-Langston
Remembering Otherwise: Artist-led Archival Practices across Sound and Media Art from the SWANA region
Music Research Seminar
- , 17:00 – 19:00 ( GMT )
- Room AG08, College Building, or online via Zoom
Speaker: Rim Ircheid
Bodies, Biodata, and Biophilic Sound: Composing with Aliveness through Sonic Life Writing and Artistic Sonation
Music Research Seminar
- 4 February 2026
Speaker: Helen Anahita-Wilson
Uncomposing Gaia: New Music, Sound Art, and the Limits of Non/Life
Music Research Seminar
- 18 February 2026
Speaker: Joseph Browning
Composing Spaces: Site-sensitive compositional practice
Music Research Seminar
- 11 March 2026
Speaker: Andrew Knight-Hill
Exploring Instrumental Agency in Contemporary Viola and Viola d'Amore Practices
Music Research Seminar
- 25 March 2026
Speaker: Marco Fusi
SPARC Symposium 2026
- 27-31 May 2026
More info to follow.
Past events
Events 2025/26
An Introduction to Our Researchers
8 October 2025
SPARC (Sound Practice and Research at City St George’s)
Events 2024/25
Embodied Research Methods in Music and Sound Study Day
June 2025
Co-organised by Dr Mira Benjamin
The goal for this study day was to take the temperature of this recently enlivened discourse - how are music and sound practitioners conducting research through embodiment?
SPARC Symposium 2025: Entangle!
June 2025
The 2025 SPARC symposium was centred on entanglement between humans and our natural, built or technological environments.
Through immersive concerts, talks, workshops and a fieldtrip we invited people from diverse artistic and academic backgrounds to come together to discuss, explore and debate. This year we entangled a marine biologist, sound artists, composers, instrumental and electroacoustic performers.
GBSR Duo - George Barton (percussion) and Siwan Rhys (piano)
Nkisi performs Shapes of Ruins as Energetic Devices
About the 2025 SPARC Symposium
Intra-Action Knowledge Exchange Workshops
, led by Dr Erik Nyström
Erik Nyström led a series of three Knowledge Exchange workshops, in which he shares his computer music research.
- Intra-Action Workshop One: Topographic Synthesis: multichannel sound textures
- Intra-Action Workshop Two. Intra-acting with sounds: principles of sonic influence
- Intra-Action Workshop Three: Cognitive assemblages: sonic cognisers and generative systems.
SPARC Symposium 2024: [Im]probable Networks+
The 2024 Symposium focused on the networks that underpin our world, from the natural networks that have been intrinsically woven through our human history and existence, via our collaborative/collective nature, to the digital networks that affect every aspect of contemporary life.
River Her Stories installation (left) & Catherine Kontz's Fleet Footing (right)
About the 2024 SPARC Symposium
SPARC Lab Spotlight
December 2024
The SPARC Lab Spotlight featured a concert of music by SPARC PhD students Pantea Armanfar, Günseli Feral Ucar, and Kristian Skårbrevik, alongside a hands-on workshop and a research seminar on ‘Articulating Space through Granular Immersive Audio’, both led by Prof. Steve Beck (Louisiana State University)
Sound Museums: Designing for Inclusion, Wellbeing and Community
June 2024
Organized in partnership with Charcoalblue, Apex Acoustics, and the Institute of Acoustics
SPARC Collective
November and December 2023
City undergraduate alumni undertook a project with the Huddersfield multi-ethnic walking group ‘We in Front’, resulting in a performance at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and a broadcast of this work on BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show.