RNCM PRiSM | February News 2025

Professor David De Roure (Technical Director of PRiSM and Professor of e-Research, University of Oxford) and Dr Hongshuo Fan (PRiSM Research Software Engineer 2023-24 and Assistant Professor of Music Technology at the College of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts (PVFA), Texas A&M University) have recently been appointed RNCM Honorary Researchers, 2025-2028.

We are excited to continue working with Professor De Roure as RNCM Honorary Professor, and Dr Fan as RNCM Honorary Research Fellow in the next three years, building upon their invaluable contribution to much of PRiSM’s ongoing research on AI and musical technology, including the development of PRiSM’s flagship software toolkit PRiSM Musical Audio Gesture Recognition (AGR), as well as the Enhancing Creative Musical Practices through Accessible AI Tools regional innovation initiative.

Read here for more details about the appointments.

The Anvil, a portrait album from Professor Emily Howard (Director PRiSM, RNCM Professor in Composition and Head of Artistic Research) and released on Delphian Records in 2023, has recently been shortlisted in the Premiere category of the 2025 BBC Music Magazine Awards.

Written in 2019, The Anvil is described as ‘a thrillingly immersive and deeply emotional commemoration of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre’  featuring the BBC Philharmonic, BBC Singers, and Hallé Choirs.

It is one of two pieces on the album of the same name, the second being Elliptics, a meditation on love and death, and what we hope will survive. Both works are set to texts by poet Michael Symmons Roberts.

The album was supported by RNCM PRiSM, through the Research England Expanding Excellence in England (E3) Grant.

The BBC Music Magazine Awards are decided by public vote. Voting is done via the BBC Music Magazine Award’s website and is open until 28 February, 2025.

In April 2025, Dr Bofan Ma (PRiSM Postdoctoral Research Associate and RNCM Research & Knowledge Exchange Postdoctoral Fellow) and Dr Kathryn Williams (PRiSM Postdoctoral Research Associate 2023-24) will present their critically acclaimed art-research initiative, Coming Up for Air in [LOCATION], at the European Platform for Artistic Research in Music (EPARM) at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Tallinn, Estonia.

Exploring the impact of indoor air pollution in public musical spaces in the UK, the initiative was successfully launched in summer 2024 and was made possible by the UKRI Regional Innovation Fund and Research England Expanding Excellence in England (E3) grant.

The duo will reflect upon placing live indoor air quality (IAQ) data and musicians’ respiratory access needs at the core of a novel intermedia musical practice, raising public IAQ awareness through multi-stranded art-research activities engaging award-winning technology solutions provider, local performing arts venues, and through educational outreach workshops. They will also discuss future research directions, challenges in this interdisciplinary approach, and the ongoing need to advocate for respiratory health access in music and the creative arts.