Conference
Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
For the inaugural SMPR conference, the overarching theme is ‘Change and Continuity’ with a focus on tradition, history and practice and the ways in which these can all be balanced alongside innovation in imagining and reimagining new pathways, avenues and perspectives for music production research. Responses to conventional ideas, challenging traditional views, structures and formats can all provide a useful starting point to explore change, development or redesign.
The conference takes place at Leeds Beckett University within the Leeds School of Arts (LSA) building, which officially opened in 2021. The LSA building provides music and sound students with state-of-the-art recording studios, performance spaces, production suites, dubbing theatres, acoustics testing labs and more. Music production research within the LSA Music and Sound team is diverse and ranges from composition, to designing and developing new instruments and music technologies. We’ve hosted a number of events such as the Sixth Art of Record Production Conference in 2010, Audio Engineering Society’s Up Your Output in 2017 and we’re excited to welcome you all to the very first SMPR conference here in the centre of Leeds.
Speakers
Renowned recording and mixing engineer and former Executive Director at the Music Producers Guild (MPG), Olga FitzRoy, has worked on scores such as The Crown with Martin Phipps, Doctor Who with Segun Akinola, The Mauritanian with Tom Hodge, Gentleman Jack with Murray Gold, and The Innocents with Carly Paradis. Alongside her film and TV works, she has worked with some of the world’s biggest acts, including Coldplay, Foo Fighters, Muse, and Dua Lipa and Martin Garrix.
Olga recorded and mixed Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s scores for BAFTA-nominated Living and Neflix’s social thriller The Strays, as well as more recently engineering Herdís Stefánsdóttir’s score for M Night Shyamalan’s latest mystery horror Knock at the Cabin.
‘The skillset involved in recording and producing a film score, and serving the narrative of the picture is a little different from a single mix (…) or an album’, says Olga, in an interview with Composer Magazine.
Featured by the BBC in their 2018 Woman’s Hour Power series, Olga is a prominent advocate on women’s issues, her campaign for Parental Pay Equality having led to a new bill being debated in Parliament. In the aftermath of the first UK lockdown in 2020, she called publicly for immediate support for recording studios in the UK. ‘The UK has some of the finest recording studios in the world’, she said for NME, inviting the government to step in.
Shara Rambarran, author of Virtual Music: Sound, Music, and Image in the Digital Era (Bloomsbury), is a musicologist and senior lecturer in music, business and media at the University of Brighton, UK. Since graduating in music from the University of Sheffield (UK), Shara did most of her practitioner/industry work (performing, composing, production, and music PR) in Essex and London, before returning to the academia to specialise in popular musicology. After completing her doctorate in music at the University of Salford, Greater Manchester (UK), she taught in various music degree programmes in the UK and North America.
Shara is passionate about writing, editing, researching, and analysing anything that is music-related regardless of genre/style, practices, timeframe etc. and in particular: remixology/post-production, digital technology, virtuality, electronica, dub, reggae, hip-hop, music production, audio-visual aesthetics, music theory, media, cultural/critical theory, music/creative industries, music education, and law. She co-runs the Art of Record Production conferences, and serves on the journal editorial boards for the Journal on the Art of Record Production, Journal of Popular Music Education, and British Pop Archive.
Shara is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, DIVA: Feminism and Fierceness from Pop to Hip-Hop (Bloomsbury), and The Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies (forthcoming). Shara is also Bloomsbury’s Music and Sound's biographer, and musicologist for Spotify’s award-winning Decode music podcast.
Simon Zagorski-Thomas is Professor of Music at the London College of Music at the University of West London. He has taught record production, recording, research methods, popular music studies and electronic music composition for over 20 years. Before teaching and researching full time, he was a professional musician and sound engineer, owning and running three studios and working as a freelance engineer, programmer, composer and producer for major labels, media companies, artists and management companies.
In 2005, Simon organised the first Art of Record Production conference in London and in subsequent years worked with Katia Isakoff and a range of international hosts to take the conference around the world. Simon and Katia also founded the Journal on the Art of Record Production and the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production. In 2016 he established the 21st Century Music Practice research network which continues to hold in-person and on-line events and also involves a Cambridge University Press Elements series and a Bloomsbury Academic book series which he edits.
He has been the leader of two UK Research Council funded projects on Performance in the Studio and Classical Music Hyper-Production. He is also currently the chair of the UK and Ireland branch of IASPM, an associate editor for the IASPM journal, organised the 10 week online IASPM UK&I conference in 2020 during Covid. He has written two monographs: The Musicology of Record Production (CUP 2014 and winner of the 2016 IASPM book prize) and Practical Musicology (Bloomsbury 2022) and co-edited two Ashgate volumes on the Art of Record Production (one with Simon Frith and the other with Katia Isakoff, Serge Lacasse and Sophie Stévance) and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production (with Andrew Bourbon). He has written multiple chapters and journal articles and edited special issues of IASPM
William Moylan is a Distinguished University Professor (2019-2022) and Professor Emeritus of Music and Sound Recording Technology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He has taught recording techniques and technologies, critical listening, music theory and musicology, and recording analysis for over 40 years.
Dr Moylan’s research explores the intersection of the sounds of recordings, music, lyrics, psychoacoustics, aural perception, cognition, and related social science sub-disciplines and the analysis of the synthesis of all that is within recorded song. He is particularly interested in the sound qualities generated by the recording process, and how those dimensions contribute to the artistry and shape the multi-dimensionality of recorded song. As a recording engineer and a producer, he has worked with emerging and leading artists across the spectrum of popular and classical genres, leading to several Grammy nominations.
He is the author of Recording Analysis: How the Record Shapes the Song (Focal Press, Routledge 2020) and co-editor with Lori Burns and Mike Alleyne of Analyzing Recorded Music: Collected Perspectives on Popular Music Tracks (Focal Press, Routledge 2023), and author of Understanding and Crafting the Mix, 3e (Focal Press, 2015) which is currently being revised into a 4th edition. His first book, The Art of Recording: The Creative Resources of Music Production and Audio was published in 1991 (Van Nostrand Reinhold).
He is pleased to be working with other members of the Steering Committee to establish the Society for Music Production Research.
About SMPR
The Society for Music Production Research is dedicated to building knowledge and dialogue among practitioners and scholars related to all aspects of music production. SMPR promotes research, publication, and networking among scholars and practitioners in the domains of creation, technologies, historical and industry contexts, aesthetics, and reception. The field is broad and includes all aspects of music production.
SMPR encourages multidisciplinary and intersectional engagement between its members, the music production industry, researchers, and related organizations and seeks to reinforce how research in music production impacts educators and students, while providing and encouraging a supportive space where members can contribute genuinely and sincerely by actively working to negate practices that perpetuate systems of oppression and exclusivity.
Please note:
All conference presenters must be SMPR members by the time they register for the conference to take advantage of the discounted rate. For membership and conference information visit: SMPR Membership.
The results of the SMPR Executive Committee election will be announced at the General Assembly of this conference. To participate in this election as either a candidate and/or voter, you must be an SMPR Member.
Conference committee
- Alex Stevenson, Course Director for BA Music Production and Performance and BA Music Industries Management, Leeds Beckett - a.s.stevenson@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
- Paul Thompson, Reader in Popular Music, Leeds Beckett - p.a.thompson@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
- William Moylan, Professor Emeritus of Music and Sound Recording Technology, University of Massachusetts Lowell
- Professor Samantha Bennett, Professor of Music, Associate Dean Higher Degree Research, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences.
- Kirk McNally, Associate Professor of Music Technology, University of Victoria, BC.
The full program will be published soon with further details on the SMPR website.
Travel and accommodation
Further information about the conference, with details on the venue, travel and links to accommodation suggestions, will soon be available via the events page on the SMPR website.
