bio

I am a researcher, designer, musician, and educator.
By day, I am a Lecturer in the Institute for Digital Technologies at Loughborough University London. ☀️
By slightly-later-that-day, I work as a semi-professional vocalist in the UK and Germany. 🌤️

Noodling around with sensors and voice tech. 🧶⚡️

I am a semi-professional vocalist and specialist in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) topics surrounding music technology and digital instrument design. Incorporating experiences from my own artistic and pedagogical practices, my research examines the entangled relationships between humans, bodies, instruments, and technology in music interaction. I am especially interested in the dynamics between vocalist and voice, as both body and instrument. I have developed an open-source platform for vocal electromyography, VoxEMG to explore how biosignal feedback changes understanding and perception of the body in vocal performance.

My work also incorporates feminist and post-human theories, exploring the sociopolitical contexts within which arts technology is used, aiming to further design for creativity and acknowledge individual, messy bodies in artistic practice. Above all, I am a passionate educator and advocate for women in STEM. I especially enjoy leading audio programming and introductory coding courses and workshops to make digital technology accessible to students working in various disciplines, especially the arts.

what gets me out of bed

My most keen HCI interests at the moment are in embodied interaction and communication between and within bodies in music performance. I want to understand more how people understand their actions, communicate with each other, and learn new skills, with the hope that we can design technology around these existing mechanisms.

Three questions that really motivate me currently:

1. How does digital technology, espectially work with AI, augment and/or change action/interactions and existing human relationships?
2. How can/how should we designate and identify technology’s role in different scenarios, depending on the needs of stakeholders and applications?
3. How can we understand these dynamic roles of technology and people in the messiness of the world and our subjective experience?

For me, the key aspects of interaction with technology are individual and come from our own unique backgrounds – with Feminist HCI at the core of my research, I aim to design and explore the relationships we have with technology while honoring subjective experience, the weirdness of bodies, and the messiness of learning and self-expression.

In addition to digital musical instrument design, my work extends to digital signal processing (including work with biosignals) for real-time multimodal feedback, music cognition, post-human design theories, eTextiles and wearable designs. I am an expert in qualitative research methodologies, such as micro-phenomenology and thematic analysis, for mixed-methods approaches in HCI.

the story (so far)

I have had the privilege of working with many incredible research labs in my career. I received my BMus in Electronic Production and Design at the Berklee College of Music (Boston, MA, USA) with Dr. Richard Boulanger. At Berklee, I also studied contemporary voice and Baroque and Romantic opera styles. I completed my MSc in Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London before doing a PhD in Computer Science in QMUL’s Centre for Digital Music as a member of the Augmented Instruments Lab, led by Prof. Andrew McPherson (now at Imperial College). I was previously a postdoctoral researcher in the Sensorimotor Interaction Group (senSInt) at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Saarbrücken, DE) with Dr. Paul Strohmeier, where I am currently an Affiliate/Visiting Researcher. I also worked on the COSMOS ERC Grant at King’s College London, under the direction of Prof. Elaine Chew.

Some nice places I've lived and learned. 🌎

also…

If I’m not working on music tech, I am probably goofing around and performing with it.
My solo project is called agouti, I compose with vocal textures and occasionally perform in London (hoping to do more soon!).
I also perform with my electronic improv group Hyphae, formed at the MPI, we perform regularly in Saarbrücken and are branching out to other cities in the EU.
I also sing regularly with the London Philharmonic Choir. 🎶

I love animals and have many pets, including a large group of fancy rats and two cats. 🐭🐱
I am also the caretaker for many many many houseplants. 🌿

phd thesis

if you want to read about what I became obsessed with over the course of four years…