professor sue miller - who am i?

I am many things -  an academic, a writer, a professional musician, a linguist and a teacher; I combine my professional work as a performer with my academic career. In terms of research I specialise in Cuban/Latin popular musics and improvisation but also publish in the areas of performance and production, French popular music, music analysis, improvisation and music education. My first book Cuban Flute Style: Interpretation and Improvisation (Scarecrow Press, 2014) explored the role of influence in the development of a style and my second book Improvising Sabor: Cuban Dance Music in New York (University Press of Mississippi, 2021) looks afresh at the history of Latin popular music in the USA. My British Academy funded practice research project (2018-2020) employed experimental archaeology approaches to live studio performance.

I have recently embarked on interdisciplinary research projects looking at musical synchronicities in music, dance and animation film, publishing a co-authored article (with Cuban dancer Guillermo Davis and head of animation Dr Sarah Louise Bowen) for Ethnomusicology Forum in 2022 entitled ‘A Musico-Choreographic Analysis of a Cuban Dance Routine – A Performance-Informed Approach.’

Alongside this I recorded the song ‘Atilana’ with my band Charanga del Norte which has now been set to a full animation film by Ged Haney proving that you can ‘dance’ your research findings! This work was presented by myself with other Leeds Beckett University academics Dr Sarah Bowen, Dr Will Barker and Ashley Dean in a panel entitled ‘Musical Gesture – an interdisciplinary exploration of synchronicities in music, dance, animation film, sound and creative digital technologies’ at the annual Royal Musical Association conference at Durham University on 8 September 2022.