I am Professor of Twenty-First Century Music. My scholarly interests lie in the broad areas of electronic music and sound art, which I research using a range of interpretive, qualitative, and practice-based methods. I also compose and perform computer music, often developing my own software to do so.

Prior to arriving at Birmingham I was a postdoc at the universities of McGill, Calgary, Leeds, and Oxford. 

I have written on such topics as early computer network music, Iannis Xenakis’s late computer music, signification and meaning in computer music, and electronic music and genre. My articles have been published in Music & Letters; Theory, Culture and Society; Computer Music Journal; Organised Sound; Leonardo Music Journal; and numerous edited collections. I am the editor of a special issue of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture on Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective (with Eric Drott), and of Organised Sound on Radical Education in Electronic Music (with Jake Williams). In 2018 I was awarded the Westrup Prize jointly with Georgina Born for our article, ‘From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-mediated musics, online methods, and genre’.

My first monograph, tentatively titled The CCRU and the Rise of Sound Art Theory, is under contract to University of Oxford Press on the Critical Conjunctures in Sound and Music series (due 2026). A critical history of British cyberculture and its afterlives in the twenty-first century, it follows the musicians, critics, politicos, theorists and philosophers who, confronting looming computerisation, turned to electronic music to domesticise the internet and render it subcultural. From the birth of rave, to the popularisation of the World Wide Web, to the expansion of higher education, to Y2K, the book shows how musicians and theorists adapted to rapid and tumultuous change, retooling radical theory and radical politics for new political realities.  

I am also a composer with interests in computer music, psychoacoustics, and audio spatialisation. My music has been described as ‘frankly (…) fucking weird, soberly hallucinatory stuff’ (boomkat.com) and like ‘a can of spray cheese with an impossibly bright spirally design on the can’ (hatchsheffield.com). I have published widely on topics to do with the perception of experimental sound synthesis methods, notably on the use of 'auditory distortion products' (difference tones) as musical material. In 2023, the Italian label Superpang published a short collection of my works titled Auditory Distortion Synthesis, and including a short critical essay. Together with Esteban Gutiérrez and Rodrigo Cádiz I received the Best Paper award at the 2023 International Computer Music Conference for “Generating Quadratic Distortion Spectra for Auditory Distortion Synthesis”. The paper was developed into an invited article for Computer Music Journal.

Between 2019-21 I was an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow on Music and the Internet: Towards a Digital Sociology of Music. The project examined the changing cultural, aesthetic, social and political implications of the Internet and World Wide Web as they impact on musical and musicological practice from the mid-1990s to the present. A key contention of the project has been that the study of culture in the last 30 years necessities new methods as the medial and material nature of historical sources and ethnographic sites are transformed by digitalisation. Music Studies After the Internet, an edited collection co-edited with Edward Katrak Spencer and Daniele Shlomit Sofer and developing these ideas, is forthcoming from Routledge.

I recently was PI (researcher: Valentina Bertolani) on the Horizon 2020-funded project Archiving post-1960s experimental music: Exploring the ontology of music beyond the score-performance dichotomy. In 2023, I was a researcher on the ERC-funded Music and Artificial Intelligence: Building Interdisciplinary Studies Project (PI: Georgina Born). 

I am interested in hearing from research students with interests aligned to mine. I currently supervise PhD students who work across post-1945 music history, practice-based research, electroacoustic composition, sound art, popular music studies, music and media, and digital musicology (with an emphasis on social and cultural approaches).