My Research
Read below for my information on my past and current research projects, academic achievements and research interests
My Academic Background
I am currently completing my Masters course in Creative music practice at Liverpool Hope University. Thus far, this course has allowed me to develop a range of music industry and research related skills, including presenting, academic writing and exploration of different research methods.
For my undergraduate course, I studied Music and Education Studies as a combined honors, achieving a first class degree. The music side of my course covered a wide range of performance, composition and researched based modules. In music I received a scholarship for my contribution to the department and particularly excelled in performance and composition receiving an A+ and an A++ respectively in my third year and receiving the Sue Willis Memorial Prize for the best performing student in music. In Education Studies I specialized in psychology and philosophy in my third year. Philosophy of education was an area that significantly impacted my research interests, through encouraging me to critically evaluate the purpose of education and the value of education research. In this module I received an A+ in my third year and received the Executive Dean's Award for Academic Excellence for my performance in this subject.
After I have completed my Masters course I intend to begin my PGCE for the 2026/27 academic year, qualifying me as a music teacher. While teaching I intend to begin my PhD in Music, allowing me to continue developing my research ability before aiming for a job as a university lecturer and researcher as my long term career goal.
My Research Area:
The area that I am currently researching and intend to research in future is the field surrounding the factors that contribute to successful performance within music. My interest in this area began as I developed as a jazz musician gaining an interest not only in the discography of my favorite musicians but also their backgrounds and approach to practice and improvisation. Many of the jazz musicians that I listened to and transcribed each exhibited extreme levels of creativity and originality while also being suspected or diagnosed as having a mental illness. This encouraged me to investigate whether there may be a relationship between these two. Although the fields of creativity research and mental illness research have grown significantly over the past 20 years, research that directly relates these two fields has been scarce, particularly regarding music. This question underlies my present research project which is described below. Over the coming years, including for my PhD project, I intend to research this topic further with hope to add further context to the music that many spend listening to and learning.
My Past and Current Research Projects
For my undergraduate dissertation, my research topic covered the two subjects involved in my course; music and education. I wanted my topic to involve research into special educational needs and the long term impacts of education. For this dissertation I received an A grade. My study aimed to investigate the long impact that taking a music course at A-level or higher can have for people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Most prior research into music education and its benefits for students focussed mainly on the short term impacts teaching methods and activities with research into the long term impacts of music education being scarce, despite the fact that a key purpose of education is to prepare students for the future. Furthermore, there is minimal research into the impacts that formal music education can have for students with ASD was also minimal, with most studies into music education and ASD coming from music therapy.
This study employed the use of interviews, encouraging 5 participants, each of which had completed a music course at A-level or above 5 to 10 years prior to the interview to reflect on their experience in music education, the social and cognitive impacts they felt this had on them and how the felt these impacts were maintained over time. Findings of this study suggested that long term cognitive and social benefits for people with ASD could be attained from music education, particularly when the course involved practical, group work activities. Click here to view the full manuscript of the project.
The current project that I am completing is for my MA course. As this course only involves music, unlike my undergraduate course, my current research project does not focus on education as a main topic. My present research project is investigating the impact that mental illness has had on the creative output of jazz musicians. This topic is more in line with my long term research interests due to its emphasis on psychology and practice. This project aims to gain an insight into the impact that bipolar disorder and schizophrenia disorder appears to influence the creativity, technical ability and coherence displayed in the music released by jazz musicians. The relationship between mental illness and creativity has been researched previously, however most of this research has only enquired into the prevalence of people with mental illness across creative fields. This project will be the first that investigates a direct relationship between mood disorders and creative output.
The methods that I have employed for this project involves a 3 step process beginning with the selection of five case studies. The case studies that were chosen for this were John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Jaco Pastorius and Bud Powell. Biographies were then chosen from each of these case studies to map which of 5 mood impacting variables (including those related to their illnesses) were present in each year of their careers. Recordings were then selected from periods were different combinations of variables appeared to have been present and a survey was created, containing short clips of these recordings with corresponding Likert scales for participants to enter ratings for the three variables mentioned above. This survey will shortly be sent out exclusively to jazz musicians before the results are compared for each artist's output in each measure periods. For more information about this project, click here to read my blog entry which details the previous literature around this topic and a more in depth discussion of the methods used.