Franziska Schroeder

Sonic Arts Research Centre · Queen's University Belfast

Visually impaired and blind (VIB) people as a community face several access barriers when using technology. For users of specialist technology, such as digital audio workstations (DAWs), these access barriers become increasingly complex—often stemming from a vision-centric approach to user interface design. Haptic technologies may present opportuni...

Immersive technologies are showing increasing potential for accessible music making. Costs, availability, interfacing methods and open-source development tools allow for exploration of the potential to facilitate atypical minds and bodies. We present a participatory study on the facilitation of accessibility within virtual reality musical environme...

Music Performance Anxiety (MPA) is a recurring issue for some musicians in the process of accomplishing the demanding coordination of physical and psychological tasks that music performance requires. Several studies have reported a correlation between higher levels of perfectionism in musicians and greater likelihood of experiencing music performan...

The primary purpose of this article is to review the potential therapeutic value of freely available VR content as an addition to the practitioners ‘toolkit’. Research has shown that virtual reality (VR) may be useful to extend existing guided imagery-based practices found in traditional mental health therapy. However, the use of VR technology with...

The global COVID-19 pandemic has been an extraordinary situation. Social distancing has impacted the vast majority of people, reorganising society, physically separating us from friends, family and colleagues. Collectively we found ourselves in a distributed state, reliant upon digital technologies to maintain social and professional connections. S...

In this article, the research group Performance without Barriers reflect on the process of collaboratively designing a custom guitar-inspired instrument with Eoin Fitzpatrick, a physically disabled musician from the Drake Music Project, Northern Ireland. As part of a longitudinal ethnographic case study designed to uncover factors that contribute t...

The ‘Performance without Barriers’ research group (PwB), based at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast has been exploring the potential of sonic arts practices and music improvisation for enhancing social inclusion. To date, the group has focused primarily on research activities related to the inclusive potential of providin...

This article provides four viewpoints on the narratives of space, allowing us to think about possible relations between sites and sounds and reflecting on how places might tell stories, or how practitioners embed themselves in a place in order to shape cultural, social and/or political narratives through the use of sound. I propose four viewpoints...

Fifty free eprints available from the publisher at: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/qnWNq2ncMfk3isWaYyUD/full This study centers upon a piano learning and teaching environment in which beginners and intermediate piano students (N = 48) learning to perform a specific type of staccato were submitted to three different (group-exclusive) teaching c...

To be published in : Special issue ‘Education through Art: Practice-based Research in Art and Design’, Guest Editors: Stuart MacDonald OBE and Julian Malins. Forthcoming in 2015. This paper tackles the abundance of inconsistent terminologies that surround the discourse on practice and research. The text builds on recent debates on creative practic...

Research in various fields has shown that students benefit from teacher's action demonstrations during instruction, establishing the need to better understand the effectiveness of different demonstration types, across student proficiency levels. This study centres upon a piano learning and teaching environment in which beginners and intermediate pi...

Teachers’ communication of musical knowledge through physical gesture represents a valuable pedagogical field in need of investigation. This exploratory case study compares the gestural behaviour of three piano teachers while giving individual lessons to students who differed according to piano proficiency levels. The data was collected by video re...

The significance of the “physicality” involved in learning to play a musical instrument and the essential role of teachers are areas in need of research. This article explores the role of gesture within teacher–student communicative interaction in one-to-one piano lessons. Three teachers were required to teach a pre-selected repertoire of two contr...

This text critically reflects on the higher education public engagement training program, entitled 'Big Ears – sonic art for public ears'. The authors detail the objectives and aims as well as the benefits of this initiative for the enhancement of the student learning experience. We consider Schmidt's (Schmidt, 2012) notion of mis-listening and Chr...

This book is about music improvisation. It forges exciting and provocative new links between a range of theories and practices in texts that explore topics as varied as object-oriented ontology, game theory, ethical responsibility and breath. In improvisatory fashion, this book has been edited so that it weaves the texts amongst each other, subvers...

In this paper, I question modes of listening in network music performance environments, and specifically draw on my experience as a performer listening in these scenarios. I situate network listening within the context of current music making, and refer to changes in compositional practices that draw specific attention to listening. I argue that so...

In this chapter the authors explore a practice-led approach to understanding the role of the body in music performance. Many writers have discussed the body in music performance, in improvised music, as well as in electronic music. In this chapter the authors offer new modalities of reflection on the musical body in the interpretation of existing...

The discourse surrounding listening has received vast theoretical attention for decades, but there has been a particular trend towards a re- examination of listening over the last ten years, highlighting a shift that moves listening to a broader understanding of musical experience. Eminent writers such as Steven Connor (2001), Jean-Luc Nancy (2002)...

This paper presents the first of a series of studies investigating the role of gestures during teaching and learning to play the piano as part of a PhD research at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in collaboration with the School of Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast (funded by DEL). Findings from research into the role of body movements and ge...

The discourse surrounding listening has received vast theoretical attention for decades, but there has been a particular trend towards a re-examination of listening over the last ten years, highlighting a shift that moves listening to a broader understanding of musical experience. Eminent writers such as Steven Connor (2001), Jean-Luc Nancy (2002),...

In this paper we reflect on the performer–instrument relationship by turning towards the thinking practices of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological idea of the body as being at the centre of the world highlights an embodied position in the world and bestows significance onto the body as a whole,...

The network is currently not only widely used for performative actions, but also extensively theorised. However, the artistic strategies in networked environments and the ways in which these new performance practices and cultural contexts can give rise to new design approaches have not been equally explored. This article therefore investigates the...

This paper addresses challenges and opportunities posed by the design and production of network performance from the point of view of collaborative creative work. We examine strategies that, while referring to the network as a new medium for performance, make use of concepts from dramaturgy to better understand the relationships between artists, au...

We address the relationship between a music performer and her instrument as a possible model for re-thinking wearable technologies. Both musical instruments and textiles invite participation and by engaging with them we intuitively develop a sense of their malleability, resistance and fragility. In the action of touching we not only sense, but more...

This paper describes a recent network music performance (NMP) study that was carried out at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast in March 2007. We refer to this study as the "Apart Project". This study is unique in that a wide variety of novel network scenarios were tested. A vast database of movie and sound files has been created as a result...

This article examines the relationship of the body with a musical instrument; specifically it looks at the vital threshold conditions that occur during the interplay of voice and instrument. By examining the work ‘IKAS' (1982) for solo saxophone by German composer Hans-Joachim Hespos, the unusual timbral relationships created between vocal and inst...

This paper considers music performance in light of the possibly most radical move away from the Cartesian idea of the body as informed by the higher order rationality of the mind: this is a performance informed by Deleuze's and Guattari's body without organs. The paper examines the particular performance activities of 'hardware hacker' Nic Collins,...

This paper is a chapter extracted from my forthcoming doctoral thesis on the body in performance" The Pontydian Performance" follows the chapter of "The Artaudian Performance". It is conceivable that Antonin Artaud's idea of a new gathering together of the activity of the human world becomes elaborated upon and refined by Maurice Merleau-Ponty as e...

We address issues raised in designing a new work for saxophonist and digital media involving 3D motion capture technology. A saxophonist's kinaesthetics are recorded with a 3D motion capture system, and used as control data in the real-time processing of sound and 3D visuals. We address current gesture research and propose an extension to current g...

This paper is a chapter extracted from my forthcoming doctoral thesis on the body in performance. "The Artaudian Performance" follows a chapter entitled "The Bergsonian Performance". The French dramatist, actor, poet and artist Antonin Artaud explored in its fullest the body as "site of all human transformation, liberation and independence"; (Barbe...