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My academic experience combines teaching, research, and knowledge exchange in the psychology and sociology of music, alongside leadership roles supporting collaborative and interdisciplinary research. I am particularly interested in music listening—specifically, what our engagement with music reveals about how we perceive ourselves and understand the world around us.

My work spans three overlapping areas: music cognition, popular music studies, and digital music media and culture. To explore these fields, I use a variety of qualitative and empirical research methods, including listening tests, interviews, audience surveys, music analysis, and theory. This multi-method approach allows me to examine the meanings and emotions that people experience with music. I use these to show how key aspects of our identity, such as gender and our relationship to the natural world, are encountered and shaped through music.

Much of this work focuses on popular music. Following my , I collaborated with her on Biophilia, the first multimedia app album released for tablet computers. Expanding on my interest in digital transformations, I now work with computer scientists and professional musicians (MIMA). Together, we co-develop assistive AI tools for music generation. We use this work as a ‘live lab’ to create ethical, inspiring technology while studying the broader cultural impacts of synthetic media.

Social justice has been a recurring theme in my work, most notably through research investigating how communities use music for social and environmental action in Colombia and the UK.

I hold degrees from City University of London and the University of Sheffield and have held visiting appointments at several international institutions. In recognition of my contributions to music studies, I received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo in 2022 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2026.