PRISM: Music and Screen

Between 2019 and 2022, PRISM led an AHRC funded research developing a new framework for studying under-represented sectors of the UK’s screen production industry in scholarship and policy.

The UK doesn't have a screen industry. It has many screen industries. Beyond the familiar worlds of the feature film and broadcast television sit many more sectors - the sectors that make music video, screen advertising, fashion film and branded content, those that produce corporate, government, NGO and medical video.

Many of these forms of moving image content are deeply rooted in the earliest filmmaking, produced from the late 19th century, and the rich output of generations of brilliant filmmakers working across the 20th century in such fields as cinema and TV advertising, industrial documentary and public information film constitute a vast proportion of our moving image archives' holdings.

This ground-breaking network brought together contemporary creative practitioners, trade associations, academics, policy makers, historians and archivists to debate and dissect key questions. Partners in the network include the British Film Institute, the Advertising Producers’ Association, Wellcome Trust, and leading scholars from Canada, the USA, Australia, France and Scandinavia to analyse the emergent rich scholarship on ‘useful film’ and its ramifications for current policy and practice. It connected to the AHRC's Creative Industries Clusters' Programme and Creative Economy research.

The interim conclusions of the network will be published in a forthcoming issue of Open Screens, 2024 jointly edited by Professor Emily Caston (UWL) and Patrick Russell, Senior Curator for Non-Fiction at the BFI National Archive.

Researchers: Professor Helen Hester and Dr Jo Henderson

Funding body: National Lottery Heritage Fund

‘DIY TV: The history of the Community Programme Unit’ aims to bring back into focus the insights of the Community Programme Unit (CPU). Although there has been a recent increase in interest in the CPU, through the ‘People make Television’ exhibition at Raven Row, the significant insights of the CPU are at risk of being lost. DIY TV aims to prevent this information from being lost by preserving and disseminating the history of the CPU.

Doing just that, the Festival of (Me)dia, a weekend long event (April 13-14 2024) as part of the larger project, provided a space for members of this unit to talk about what it was like to be involved as it developed over the 30 years since it was started in 1972.

For more information, see the project webpage.

• Researcher: Professor Emily Caston
• Funding body: The British Academy
• Project dates: 5 April 2021 to 30 June 2022
• Industry Partner: The Advertising Producers’ Association

Summary

Commercials made for television, cinema and the internet have been a controversial but also celebrated part of popular culture discourse in Britain. Yet very little is known about the filmmakers who create them.

This research project looks at the community of filmmakers employed by specialist film and television companies, many set up in the 1960s following the launch of commercial TV in Britain in 1955. The project investigates the history of this community through the narrative of its little-known professional association, the Advertising Producers' Association.

Since its launch, the Association has fought for improvements in diversity, education and training, and social responsibility - acting often as a progressive and radical force within advertising.

This work represents part of Caston’s ongoing research into the ‘hidden screen industries’ in Britain, and the results will be published in a forthcoming book with Routledge.

Researcher: Professor Helen Hester

Launched in March 2021, Feminist Futures is a two-year programme of research led by Professor Helen Hester in collaboration with Autonomy, a progressive think tank exploring the future of work.

It will seek to host events and pursue new projects, while also providing a digital platform for the dissemination of new ideas concerning gender, technology and work.

Researchers: Professor Emily Caston and Professor Justin Smith

Funding body: Arts and Humanities Research Council

In 2015, an Arts and Humanities Research Council award was made to a team of researchers led by Professor Emily Caston and Professor Justin Smith to examine the history of British music video since the 1960s.

The project ran 2015-2018 and was conducted in partnership with the British Film Institute.

A summary of the work and all of the outputs of the research (three journal special issues, a monograph and a limited edition DVD of 200 landmark music videos) can be found on the British Film Institute (BFI) website.

Read more about British Music Video: Assessing Industry, Influence and Impact 1966-2016 .

Researcher: Professor Emily Caston

Funding body: Arts and Humanities Research Council

A Follow-on Funding grant was awarded to Professor Emily Caston by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to take curated programmes of British music videos on a world tour (2017-2019).

It involved a series of workshop collaborations with the Danza Contemporanea de Cuba, Cuba rapper / hip hop artist Telmary Diaz and British music video director WIZ in Cuba in May 2018.

Read more about Drawing, Dancing and Dreaming.

Researcher: Professor Jeremy Strong

Funding body: Erasmus

An Erasmus-funded project with 6 European partners.

• Duration: 2018 – 2021
• Project value: €264,423
• Project Co-Ordinator: Jeremy Strong

UWL is the lead institution for this project which will create a computer learning game to support the education of sustainable development for children aged 6 – 10 and to raise their interest in STEM in formal and informal learning contexts.

The goal is to raise environmentally-conscious European citizens, knowledgeable about sustainability challenges, and ready to act and contribute to sustainable European and global societies.

Researcher: Professor Helen Hester

Helen Hester’s research has considered issues such as: the feminisation of domestic and workplace technologies (including the automation of secretarial and emotional labour, and the exploitation of cultural ideas about gender in the design of digital voice assistants); the gendered discourses surrounding chatbots (particularly, the adoption of the personas of young women by corporate Twitter bots); the rise of ‘artificial artificial intelligence’ (as a marketing technique obscuring the often feminised labour performed by a hyperexploited human workforce); and the influence of 1990s cyberfeminism upon contemporary gender political art and activism in digital spaces.

She was on the review board for UNESCO's ‘Steering AI and Advanced ICTs for Knowledge Societies’ report.

Dr Hester recently recorded a podcast for The Guardian on these AI issues:

• Podcast 'Do smart assistants need a feminist reboot?' part 1
• Podcast 'Do smart assistants need a feminist reboot?' part 2

Find out more about the Gender, Technology and Work project.

Rhythm Symposium is a study day dedicated to rhythm in composition, performance and theory, encompassing a conference of academic talks, lecture-recitals and live performances.

Researcher: Professor Justin Paterson

Funding body: Innovate UK

In 2019, Innovate UK (part of the new UK Research and Innovation group) awarded £1 million to the “HAPPIE” project (Haptic Authoring Pipeline for the Production of Immersive Experiences).

This project is being conducted by a consortium comprising Generic Robotics Ltd, Numerion Software Ltd, Science Museum Group, Sliced Bread Animation, Open University and the University of West London.

Find out more about the HAPPIE project.

Researcher: Professor Simon Zagorski-Thomas

Run: 2015 -

Value: £40,101

AHRC funded Classical Music Hyper-Production and Practice As Research project.

Researcher: Professor Simon Zagorski-Thomas

Run: 2012-2013

Value: £35,561

AHRC funded Performance in the Recording Studio Research project.

Researcher: Professor Justin Paterson

The Innovation in Music conference is a European music industry conference bringing together researchers and professionals alike who are interested in the future of the music industry, from the artist through to the consumer.

It was co-founded in 2013 by Professor Justin Paterson with a scope that included innovations in music: creation, technology, production and business, through to sound engineering, games music, post-production and particularly cross-disciplinary themes.

The 2019 conference was held at the University of West London and chaired by Paterson and showcased a world first in remote performance.

Researchers: Professor Justin Paterson and Professor Rob Toulson

Funding body: Arts and Humanities Research Council

In 2014, Professor of Music Production Justin Paterson was awarded £80,000 funding, in collaboration with Professor Rob Toulson from Anglia Ruskin University, Director of its Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) research institute.

The research was funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) via its 'Digital Transformations' theme to a total value of £80,000.

The project investigated the app as a potential album-release format of the future with algorithmically controlled playback to ‘automatically remix’ the music live, to lure the consumer away from the ‘single-track download’ mentality.

Find out more about The Interactive Album App.

Researcher: Professor Justin Paterson

Funding body: Arts and Humanities Research Council

In 2015, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded a follow-on research project called The Commercialisation of Interactive Music, led by Professor Justin Paterson – this time releasing music from several international Warner Music Group artists in the variPlay format.

Find out more about variPlay.

Researchers: Professor Justin Paterson and Professor Rob Toulson

Funding body: UWL

UWL seed funding provided Professor Justin Paterson with the chance to collaborate with Swedish innovator Håkan Lidbo in 2018.

The work was to model traditional Swedish musical instruments from the Swedish Museum of Performing Arts in virtual reality, and allow users to easily interact with them and play algorithmic music via authentic recordings of the actual museum instruments in an ensemble of other such traditional instruments from the collection.

Researcher: Professor Simon Zagorski-Thomas

The London and SE 21st Century Music Practice Research Network was established by Professor Simon Zagorski-Thomas of the University of West London in the summer of 2016.

The aim was to encourage and disseminate research and scholarly collaboration that includes all areas of contemporary musical activity. In particular the network aimed to stimulate discourse between disciplines: bringing together scholars from popular music, musical theatre, performance studies, music for visual media, recording, electronic and electroacoustic music, live sound, ethnomusicology and composition to discuss broad themes that are relevant across subject boundaries. 

Find out more about 21st Century Music Research Practice Network.

Researcher: Mike Exarchos

Mike Exarchos, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in the London College of Music has conducted research on British bands Joy Division and New Order.

Beginning 22 October 2020, the eight part pod-cast series ‘Transmissions: The Definitive Story’ featured Dr Mike Exarchos and also exclusive interviews with the band; Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris, Gillian Gilbert and Peter Hook, plus contributions from iconic guests and narrated by Maxine Peake.

‘Transmissions: The Definitive Story’ podcast is available via Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube and Amazon Music.

Researchers: Professor Sara McGuinness and Professor Simon Zagorski-Thomas

The Cuban Music Room and the UWL Music Room (UWL seed funding £3,000, UWL University Teaching fellow Funding £700).

The Music Rooms are low-tech immersive music systems created by Professor Sara McGuinness and Professor Simon Zagorski-Thomas in conjunction with a team of Cuban academics and practitioners.

It provides in-depth access to performances set within their ‘home’ settings at a relatively low cost.

A pilot recording of top Cuban rumba group ‘Los Muñequitos de Matanzas’ has been displayed with great success. Just before COVID-19 lockdown, they began work with UWL staff and students on a UWL based version of the project. They also captured a performance of acclaimed British Jazz trumpeter Byron Wallen and his Hurricane Bells project, creating music inspired by bells cast to the coordinates of Hurricane Katrina as it headed towards New Orleans. 

Researcher: Professor Robert Sholl

Robert Sholl has been involved in a practice-based research project on the Phantom of the Opera.

A podcast of some of his improvision is on YouTube. The full ten episodes will include original music in late-nineteenth century style (three arias and one opera scene performed using a period piano) which he composed plus some further improvisations. The podcast was produced by Dr Leslie McMurtry at Salford University.