Academic staff profile Dr Nikki Moran

Current and recent teaching

Presenting lecturer and co-author of the 'Fundamentals of Music Theory' MOOC, hosted by Coursera.

• Fundamentals of Music Theory (UG) *
• Music and Human Communication (UG) *
• Creative Practice Music Project  (UG)
• Dissertation supervision (UG)
• Introduction to Musicology (PG)
• Music, Style, Identity and Image in the Modern Age *  (UG) [EUSA Teaching Award 'Best Course' overall winner, 2017]

* Course Organiser

Blog posts and video presentations

• Music and the Hidden Curriculum https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/fundamentalsofmusictheory/2020/06/30/presentation-part-1/ **
• Hybrid course design: virtual walk-through https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/fundamentalsofmusictheory/2020/07/01/presentation-part-2/ **
• Critical course design features https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/fundamentalsofmusictheory/2020/07/01/presentation-part-3/ **
• Online assessment: Using quizzes in Learn https://digital.eca.ed.ac.uk/hybridteaching/learn-quizzes/
• Sharing an experience - Media Production Studios https://digital.eca.ed.ac.uk/hybridteaching/production-studios-experience/

** From Appleby-Donald and Moran (2020), ‘Critical approaches to the hidden curriculum with hybrid learning in music’, University of Edinburgh Learning and Teaching Conference, June 25, 2020.

My research explores the relationship between musical performance and everyday social interaction. I'm motivated by what we can learn about music when we focus specifically on its manifestation as performance - as human communication. And vice-versa: what this type of pragmatic and interdisciplinary approach can reveal about social minds, life and behaviour. I’m particularly interested in the ethical and inclusive possibilities of 4E cognition when this approach is brought to bear on the study of musical performance. (See editorial to the new Special Issue on ‘Embodiment in Music’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies, Schiavio & Moran, 2021).

I’m currently exploring how dominant – typically ethnocentric – values of musical practice and listening come to interact with ideas about music in scientific discourse and academic settings more broadly. I'm co-convening the next international Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology (CIM22) on the topic 'Participation' in order to develop work around these issues, which have critical implications for music education.

Previously, my doctoral research with elite North Indian musicians combined methods of ethnography and video analysis. My subsequent 'Improvising Duos' project was funded through awards from British Academy and The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, and facilitated by resources of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig. We used motion capture to record duo improvisations by jazz and free improvising musician duos. Findings from our original experiment are reported in PLoSONE, 'Perception of 'back-channeling' nonverbal feedback in musical duo improvisation' (Moran et al. 2015). This project also generated an original dataset of kinematic and audio recordings, published in DataShare (Moran & Keller, 2016). Related research developed as part of my Visiting Fellowship on the AHRC project, Interpersonal Entrainment in Musical Performance (2016-18) at Durham University, UK.