My chapter on Miley Cyrus's child voice appears in the book 'Singing Out: The Musical Voice in Audiovisual Media'. Here is the abstract: With reference to recordings made by Miley Cyrus between the ages of between 12 and 16 years old for Disney’s Hannah Montana, this chapter examines how the manipulation of her voice through auto-tune and other studio production techniques attempted to construct a normative girlhood by controlling sonic elements (pitch, vibrato, formant freq

Large marionnettes hanging on a rail Between 2021 and 2023, I worked as the senior researcher on the Researching the Arts in Primary...

I recently used ChatGTP for the first time. I’d had a conversation with a colleague about using AI to analyse interview transcriptions which led me to this video on ‘How to research and write using generative AI tools’. I’m very much a jump-in-and-have-a-go sort of person so after about ten minutes of learning how to write an effective prompt for AI, I thought I’d give it a go. Rather than let ChatGPT loose on my research data just yet, I thought I’d test its creative abili

I've just had an article published in a special edition about laughter in the Jeunesse journal which focusses on 'young people, texts and...

A 3.5 min video to introduce 'Spinning the Child: Musical Constructions of Childhood through Records, Radio and Television' (Routledge...

Being asked to do talks and interviews around the book, I find myself explaining the contents, my motivations, and my journey through the writing process in different ways to different audiences. Here is a short piece I wrote for my upcoming talk (December 2020) to post-grad students in the Cultures in Education Research, and Music in Education Research Groups at Birmingham City University. My new book, ‘Spinning the Child: ‘Musical Constructions of Childhood through Records

A small stack of books has just arrived. The excitement is the same as when I held the first vinyl singles and albums by my various...

Wistful children's song adapted as a call for Civil Rights 'Bein' Green' first appeared on the children’s television programme Sesame...

... in other words How to quantify subjective aspects of media made for children (and others). ... officially known as The Children's...

This piece was initially included in a longer essay about jazz music on children's television. As most of what is included here is about jazz music in films that were created for cinema, it didn't sit well with other material. Most of it covers the films made by Fleischer Studios, Warner Brothers and Disney. It features many well-known characters such as Betty Boop, Popeye, Tom and Jerry, Dumbo and more. Many of these animated films and 'theatrical shorts' transferred to TV (