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. 🌤️

My research is in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), with my most keen interests in embodied interaction and movement perception. 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:

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

I am especially interested in music technology and working with singers; I have incorporated much of my work into my own vocal practice. 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.

I have had the privilege of working with many incredible research labs in my career. I completed my PhD in Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London in the Centre for Digital Music as a member of the Augmented Instruments Lab, led by Prof. Andrew McPherson (now Imperial College). I was previously a postdoctoral researcher in the Sensorimotor Interaction Group (senSInt) at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany 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.

The voice is body and instrument. Third-person interpretation of the voice by listeners, vocal teachers, and digital agents is centred largely around audio feedback. For a vocalist, physical feedback from within the body provides an additional interaction. The vocalist’s understanding of their multi-sensory experiences is through tacit knowledge of the body. This knowledge is difficult to articulate, yet awareness and control of the body are innate. In the ever-increasing emergence of technology which quantifies or interprets physiological processes, we must remain conscious also of embodiment and human perception of these processes. Focusing on the vocalist-voice relationship, this thesis expands knowledge of human interaction and how technology influences our perception of our bodies. To unite these different perspectives in the vocal context, I draw on mixed methods from cognitive science, psychology, music information retrieval, and interactive system design. Objective methods such as vocal audio analysis provide a third-person observation. Subjective practices such as micro-phenomenology capture the experiential, first-person perspectives of the vocalists themselves. Quantitative-qualitative blend provides details not only on novel interaction, but also an understanding of how technology influences existing understanding of the body.

related publications

2023