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, forthcoming.)
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. For example, my article on musicological ‘individualism’ in Frontiers in Psychology (2014); a chapter for Routledge Handbook of Music Cognition, on oral and improvising musical practices (2017). These issues have critical implications for music education. I've begun writing about this lately, see forthcoming book chapter for Chicago University Press, co-authored with two PhD graduates, on ‘Interactions in Indian music: connections and critical reflections’. This line of work is also evident in – and influenced by – my teaching practice and work in Music HE curriculum design towards a critical, inclusive approach to music education.
Previously, my doctoral research with elite 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 Psychology of Music, 'Music, bodies and relationships: An ethnographic contribution to embodied cognition studies' (2013).
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, 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). Related research developed as part of my Visiting Fellowship on the AHRC project, Interpersonal Entrainment in Musical Performance (2016-18) at Durham University, UK.
