معرفی
Dr. Nikki Moran serves as Senior Lecturer in Music and Subject Area Director of Education at the University of Edinburgh's Reid School of Music within Edinburgh College of Art. Her interdisciplinary work bridges musicology, psychology, and ethnography with focus on musical performance as social interaction.
Her educational background includes:
- PhD in Measuring Musical Meaning: analysing communication in embodied musical behaviour (Open University, 2007)
- MMus in Interaction in and as North Indian classical music (University of Cambridge, 2002)
- Bachelor of Music (City University London, 2001)
Research interests center on situated cognition in musical performance, examining interpersonal processes among North Indian instrumentalists, jazz improvisers, and classical ensembles. Her current RSE Personal Research Fellowship (2024-5) investigates accompaniment as creative-relational interaction through musical ethnographies. Methodologically, she combines ethnography, motion capture, and experimental design to explore non-verbal communication in musical contexts.
Her publication trends reveal growing emphasis on ecological perspectives in music cognition, interdisciplinary methodology, and critical examination of scientific discourse. Recent work increasingly engages with AI-mediated interaction and planetary-scale sonic thinking.
Award recognition includes:
- Finalist: 2022 Open Education Awards for Excellence
As lead author of the University of Edinburgh's Coursera MOOC Fundamentals of Music Theory (300,000+ learners), she has transformed music education access. She supervises PhD candidates through the Musical Situations study group and serves as incoming Editor-in-Chief of Psychology of Music. External roles include External Examiner at Queen's University Belfast and former President of the International Society for Interdisciplinary Musicology.
Her Musical Situations study group (co-led with Una MacGlone) fosters interdisciplinary collaboration within the Edinburgh Futures Institute's 'Creativity, AI, and the Human' cluster, connecting researchers across cognitive science, ethnomusicology, and digital humanities.
