This week I attended a two-day conference on health, gender, bodies, and sex at ANU. I was there because I have been working on a health humanities project as a research officer at ANU, under one of my PhD supervisors, Bonnie McConnell. The idea of health humanities is to examine this intersection between medical research […]
This year, I’ve thrown my hat in the ring to present at SXSW Sydney. SXSW is a big conference and festival that aims at sharing new research and industry info to other creatives and the general public. I’ve submitted my research in there in the hopes to meet some more people in this area, share […]
I watched all of Foundation on Apple TV+ recently, after reading the first 5 books years ago. Since then, I’ve been meaning to read some more Asimov, starting with the Robot series. Asimov was the first to coin the term “robotics”, by exploring the scientific principles that might underpin futuristic robots. Although the idea of […]
You’re probably familiar with the concept of bi-lingualism, which is where someoneone is fluent in 2 languages (for example, English and Indonesian, or Chinese and Japanese). But did you also know there’s a similar concept in music, called bi-musicality? This is where one person is fluent within 2 musical systems. You may have heard the […]
Recently, ANU announced it was closing the Art and Music library branch. Of course, they have been very tight-lipped on the details, so we don’t know exactly what that entails. What we know is: that the physical location of the library will be repurposed into study spaces for students; some materials will be moved into ANU’s main Chifley Library, and the rest will be stored in a repository and can be borrowed by request online. I was very disheartened by this news, so I went on a big borrowing spree last week before the doors closed and borrowed about 30 books. Anything that looked remotely relevant to my research, I borrowed. Yes, I probably should have done this earlier anyway – I have typically done most of my research online, which I suspect is a reason for this decision. But as I’ll go on to explain, I think this is a short-sighted reason to close a library.
Last week, I was able to attend the 46th Musicological Society of Australia (MSA) conference in Adelaide. This is one of Australia’s two largest music conferences, the other being the Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). This is, then, the place to be to see what current topics are being researched in Australian music studies.
In this post, I discuss musicology in Australia and the sorts of research currently being done in this area.