Capturing Creativity 2025 - Presentation 3: 9th October 2025 - Pathways to Practice Research: Developing Projects and Pedagogies in Contemporary and Experimental Music (Mira Benjamin, Scott McLaughlin and Lauren Redhead)

Presentation 3 from the 'Capturing Creativity 2025' seminar series, on Thursday 9th October 2025.The session was chaired by Dr. Avsar Gurpinar. Assoc. Prof. Avşar Gürpınar is a scholar, designer, and co-founder of the Ambiguous Standards Institute. He holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Industrial Product Design. In 2021, the Arts Council England endorsed him as an exceptional talent in arts and culture. Avşar works as a senior lecturer in contemporary art and speculative design at the School of Design and Creative Arts, Loughborough University. His research focuses on critical design, cultural studies, and art and design history. His works include "When Pigs Fly," a public artwork created in collaboration with Cansu Curgen, and "Ambiguous Standards Institute's" solo exhibition, held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. The Art Institute of Chicago, MSU Broad, and Loughborough University have acquired several pieces of ASI's work for their permanent collections.Speakers: Mira Benjamin, Scott McLaughlin and Lauren Redhead.Mira Benjamin is a Canadian violinist specialising in 20th and 21st century experimental music. She is a member of the London-based ensembles Apartment House and Plus Minus, with whom she performs internationally. Mira's research explores frameworks of embodiment in music and interdisciplinary live performance. She is interested in how the human body holds and experiences knowledge, and how these ways of knowing can support performers in both professional and research contexts, and at all stages of education. Mira is Lecturer in Performing Arts at City St. George’s, University of London, where she is a member of SPARC (Sound Practice & Research @ City), as well as co-convening the RMA Practice Research Study Group.Scott McLaughlin (b.1975) is an Irish composer and improviser based in Huddersfield (UK). He started out as a shoegaze/experimental guitarist before studying music in his 20s at University of Ulster then MA/PhD University of Huddersfield. Currently, Scott lectures in composition and music technology at the University of Leeds, and co-directs CePRA (Centre for Practice Research in the Arts), as well as co-convening the RMA Practice Research Study Group. His research focuses on composing for contingency and indeterminacy in the physical materiality of sound. Scott was Co-I on the AHRC SPARKLE project (Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Engagement - 2022), and recently completed an AHRC Leadership Fellowship, the ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ project, on composing for contingency in clarinets.Lauren Redhead is a composer of experimental music, a performer of contemporary music for the organ, and an author of texts on 20th and 21st century music, and practice research. Her recent work has been concerned with the methodological critique of practice research, and the development of methodologies within practice research. She has been a contributor to the Practice Research Advisory Group (PRAG), JISC, the UK Reproducibility Network, and the Royal Musical Association (RMA) regarding this area. Her practice research was the joint recipient of the 2024 RMA Practice Research Prize and was highly commended in 2023. Lauren is the Head of School for Music, English and Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is also the co-chair of the University's practice research group. She was previously the co-director for the Centre for Practice Based Research in the Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University from 2014-18.Abstract: Researchers in the creative arts often come to research from established artistic careers and backgrounds in professional practice. While these researchers bring a wealth of lived knowledge and disciplinary innovation to their research communities, they may lack methodological training to support their research agenda. This challenge is compounded by the ‘methodological pluralism’ (Borgdorff 2012) that is often seen as a key strength of practice research, but which can seem overwhelming without training and appropriate models at the start of a research journey. Bulley and Şahin (2021) note ‘a need for further guidelines and support that recognises the fluid and nonlinear method approaches’ that artists use, ultimately to strengthen their research to continue to critically engage with existing methods and epistemologies.In this presentation we outline a researcher development framework for practice research at MA/MFA-level, which we propose can open up creative modes of presentation and methods of dissemination. By focusing on Level 7 research training, we suggest a values-based approach that can be scaled up to support PhD, ECR and REF outputs—and indeed scaled down to support practice research at UG. Drawing on examples from our fields of contemporary and experimental music, we emphasise the potential of audiovisual formats, such as annotated or ‘illuminated’ (Spatz, 2021) video, to tangibly link documented practice with written components in the context of multi-component outputs. These digital storytelling strategies can effectively synthesise critical positioning and (auto-)ethnographic reflection with the multimodal (embodied, phenomenological, tacit, sensory) knowledge formats that are essential to so many creative practice research projects. Many of the reflections presented are drawn from the Goldsmiths MMus module Practice Research in Music, which has been developed and delivered by all of the presenters since 2019. However, applications of these pedagogic practices are applicable across all levels of HE and have already been implemented in additional contexts that we also describe and reflect on.This item contains: MP4 recording of the presentation with transcription and PDF of the powerpoint slides.Mira Benjamin's video is available via youtube here.

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