Sound and the Environment

This Research & Innovation Doctoral Project brief summarises our priority areas of research interest under the heading of: Sound and the Environment.

We welcome all research degree applications aligned with and in response to this brief.

Project brief details

This project invites PhD candidates to explore the interrelatedness of sound and the environment through practice-based and theory-based research.

Sound as material, as media, as sensation, as vibration, as transmitted frequencies, as signal, as noise, as music(al) offers a diverse range of approaches to studying the environment and, moreover, relationships to the world through sound environments. The developing diversity and scope of sound studies, the current re-inventions of acoustic ecology, and the environmental urgencies articulated by soundscape ecology, all foreground sound and practices of listening as vital to developing critical understandings of urban and rural environments in a time of climate emergency, valuing the intersections of the arts, humanities and sciences.

Candidates are encouraged to develop projects that seek to think and rethink, to imagine and re-imagine geopolitics, social inequalities, the 'natural' world, dark ecologies, deep ecologies, the non-human, the ahuman and the 'Anthropocene', through macro and microattention to sound and the environment. The project seeks to develop propositions that pertain to sustainability and social equality (critically and creatively).

Strategic alignment

Projects deriving from this brief are expected to sit within the following Research & Innovation programme and department:

Programme	Dark Economies & Environmental Futures
Department	Academy of Music & Theatre Arts

As successful research degree project proposals must emphasise a clear alignment between the project idea and one or more of our Research & Innovation programmes, we recommend that you review details of the programme aligned to this brief before you complete the application process.

Project brief lead

Dr D Ferrett Profile Image

Project supervisor: Dr D Ferrett

Dr D Ferrett is Course Leader for BA(Hons) Popular Music and a Senior Lecturer in Music. Since beginning her employment at Falmouth University in 2011, D has been instrumental in the development of the curriculum for music subject and has played a leading role in writing Falmouth's contemporary Popular Music degree course. She is the author of Dark Sound: Feminine Voices in Sonic Shadow (Bloomsbury, 2020) which adopts a critical feminist approach to music discourse and to the study of 'dark sound', developing a darkfemphonosophy through listening to artists whose music embodies dark themes.

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