Team

Feeling Sound Musiclab has been set up by conductor and researcher Christopher Gayford and music psychologist Jane Ginsborg. It is based on research undertaken by Christopher Gayford, Jane Ginsborg, Caroline Minassian and John Sloboda.

Christopher Gayford studied piano at the Royal College of Music and conducting at the Royal Northern College of Music with Timothy Reynish. He has conducted a wide range of repertoire and worked with many major British orchestras and opera companies, including the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (where he held the post of assistant conductor), Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, BBC Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Opera North and Scottish Opera.

Internationally, he has taken part in master classes with Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Ilya Musin and Peter Eotvos and competed in two international conducting competitions. In Cadaques, he won second prize, and in Besancon, joint first prize. These successes lead to concerts in Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Austria.

As a founder member of the new music group Psappha, he was involved in education project work that now forms one of his chief areas of interest. He has conducted the City of Sheffield Youth Orchestra since 1993, and is currently working on the long-term audience development project Feeling Sound. In January 2000, he lead a series of three feeling sound concerts at the Barbican with the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, during which he conducted Mozart's last three symphonies. In 2001, he was appointed Research Fellow at Trinity College of Music, where he collaborated with the eminent music psychologist, Professor John Sloboda, on developing new ways of teaching listening skills.

He is currently developing Feeling Sound as a long-term audience development project, and with music students at the Royal Northern College of Music, in collaboration with Jane Ginsborg and Gunter Kreutz. You can hear him discussing Feeling Sound techniques on BBC Radio 3, and read about details of his conducting courses and his work with young musicians.

Psychologist Dr Jane Ginsborg is a Research Fellow at the Royal Northern College of Music, who will be analysing the results of the experiments. Jane has been enthusiastic about Feeling Sound since she was first introduced to it by Christopher Gayford and psychologist John Sloboda from Keele University 5 years ago. She has heard its effects on young musicians and uses it herself as a performer. Jane has worked with Christopher on the Enhancing Expressivity project at the Royal Northern College of Music, in which Feeling Sound techniques were taught to student pianists. She is looking forward to finding out how the techniques influence the musical appreciation of the much wider sample of listeners taking part in Musiclab.

Jane read music at the University of York, and trained as a singer at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Following a successful freelance career as a professional singer and singing teacher, she studied psychology with the Open University, gaining a BA degree with first class honours, and completed her PhD in 1999 at Keele University, funded by the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council.

Jane is a Chartered Psychologist, member of the British Psychological Society and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She carried out post-doctoral research at the University of Sheffield and has lectured in psychology at the University of Manchester, Leeds Metropolitan University, and the Open University. She has published widely on expert musicians' approaches to practising and memorizing, and won the British Voice Association's Van Lawrence Award in 2002 for her research on singers' memorizing strategies.

Jane has been a Research Fellow in the Centre for Music Performance Research, part of the Royal Northern College of Music's Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, since 2005. Recent research includes: how expert musicians prepare for performance, as individuals and duo partners; how small group music making and chamber music can best be taught, learned and assessed; and music performance students' health and well-being.

Geoff Cox is the web designer and computer consultant for Feeling Sound.