My research explores the relationship between musical performance (improvisation in particular) 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.
Current interests include scientific discourse around music, and the ways in which core conceptualisations of practice and listening in this domain come to interact with ideas (and values) about music in policy and educational settings.
Previously, my doctoral research with North Indian musicians combined methods of ethnography and video analysis. This work is published as a chapter in the edited book, Experience and Meaning in Music Performance (OUP, 2013), and in the journal Psychology of Music, 'Music, bodies and relationships: An ethnographic contribution to embodied cognition studies' (2013).
The 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, in collaboration with Prof. Peter Keller. 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). Recently, this corpus and related research have been developed as part of my Visiting Fellowship on the AHRC project, Interpersonal Entrainment in Musical Performance (2016-18) at Durham University, UK.
Past doctoral student projects include research into the kinematics of ensemble conducting (Yu-Fen Huang), cross-cultural perception of symbolic representation of musical sounds (Athanasopoulos), and social experiences in sitar/tabla co-performance (Cooper).
