Project leader – Senior University Lecturer, University of Cambridge
David is musicologist and cultural historian. His research focuses on nineteenth-century intellectual history, Richard Wagner, and the philosophy of technology. Other interests include Franz Liszt and post-Classical Weimar, performance theory and the grey area between improvisation and composition, as well as posthumanism and musical creativity in the digital age. His first monograph, Wagner’s Melodies (CUP 2013), examines the cultural and scientific history of melodic theory in relation to Wagner’s writings and music. Other publications include editions and translations, as well as research and review articles, and some media work. [more]
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, September 2016 – August 2018
I’m a researcher working on histories of sound and listening, especially related to 19th century devices like the théâtrophone, phonograph, telephone, stethoscope. I’m currently interested in “sensing the archive” and ways we can reconstruct past listening situations [more]
Edward is a cultural historian who specializes in British science, technology, architecture, and politics in the nineteenth century. He is examining the intersections between music and science with particular emphasis on how materialistic conceptions of how sound worked fashioned new approaches to music. He collected a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2015. Working under the supervision of Professor William Whyte, he completed a thesis examining the uses of scientific knowledge in the building of Charles Barry’s new Houses of Parliament at Westminster between 1834 and 1860. [more]
Melle primarily works on the intersection of musicology, sound studies and media theory. His current project deals with the development of the physical concepts of Fourier analysis and sine waves and their importance for the study of sound and music in the first half of the nineteenth century. He previously completed a PhD thesis at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam) on the role of noise in recorded sound and music and has published multiple articles on noise, sound technology and popular music. [more]
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, January 2019 – current
Trained in musicology and music theory, I research intersections between music and developments in the visual arts, cognitive studies and psychology, and science and technology, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My postdoctoral project focuses on graphical representations of music around 1900, inquiring the tension and mediation between manual and mechanical forms of inscription. [more]
Sound and Materialism in the 19th Century 