Participant Directory

Julie Ballantyne is known for her work in the areas of music teacher identities, social justice, music teacher education, and the social and psychological impacts of musical engagement. An Associate Professor in Music Education in the School of Music at the University of Queensland, Australia, she has won commendations and fellowships for her teaching, and also holds leadership positions with organisations such as the International Society for Music Education.

Julie has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Research Studies in Music Education (SAGE) since 2018 and was Chair of the International Society of Music Education (MISTEC) from 2016–2018. She has served on editorial boards for the International Journal of Music Education, Education Studies, Research Studies in Music Education and Psychology of Music, and as Secretary for the Asia-Pacific Society of Music Education Research.

Her research output includes over 45 refereed publications including a research monograph and an edited book Navigating Music and Sound Education, with most articles in top-tier journals. She has led an Australian Learning and Teaching Council Grant (Music Teachers Oz) using online, collaborative case-based learning in music education courses across Australia.

Mario Baroni was full professor and former director in the Department of Music of the University of Bologna. For many years he guided the section of Systematic Musicology in the Doctoral School of the same University.

In 1990 he founded the Italian association for the analysis and theory of music (Gruppo Analisi e Teoria Musicale). He was one of the promoters of the foundation of ESCOM (European Society for the Study of Cognitive Aspects of Music), and president for three years of this society.

He has published works on music analysis, emotional aspects of music experience, social impact of music, methodology of music education, and historical topics, particularly of 20th century music.

Líliam Barros Cohen is a pianist and Ethnomusicology Professor at the Pará State Federal University (UFPA). She is coordinator of the UFPA Ethnomusicology Laboratory and the Amazon Music and Identity Research Group.

Ubiratan Bizarro Costa is an industrial designer and design professor. He currently creates research and development projects for products in the area of mobility and inclusive design, designing and building exoskeleton prototypes, equipment for the physically challenged, compact electric vehicles for urban mobility, and bionic Extension Gloves — initially developed for Maestro João Carlos Martins, enabling him to return to the piano after 22 years.

He has worked across the automotive, advertising, and product design industries, with clients including Mitsubishi Motors, Bosch, and Allied Signal, among others. He also founded a drawing school focused on preparing students for the realities of art and design markets.

Bruno Deschênes is a Canadian shakuhachi player, composer and independent ethnomusicologist. His two main fields of research are the aesthetic of Japanese traditional music and transmusicality — a term referring to musicians who become masters of a music from a culture not native to them.

Among his books: Le shakuhachi japonais, Une tradition réinventée (L'Harmattan, Paris, 2017); Une philosophie de l'écoute musicale (L'Harmattan, 2019); L'écoute de la musique à l'esprit (L'Harmattan, 2021); and Transmusicality, Mastering the Music of Another Culture (Croatian Musicological Society, 2022).

Stefan Fiol is a Professor of Ethnomusicology and Affiliated Faculty in Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He researches music, dance, ritual practice, media and the histories of commercial and folkloric cultural representation in the Uttarakhand Himalayas and North India.

His monograph, Recasting Folk in the Himalayas: Indian Music, Media and Social Mobility (University of Illinois Press, 2017), received the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Jim Fisher Book Award (Honorable Mention).

His current research explores drumming as a historiographic tool in the central Himalayas, and an emergent area of his research examines the role of music and mindfulness in stimulating memory, cognitive function, and experiences of awe and flow.

Tecumseh Fitch studies the evolution of cognition and communication in animals and man, focusing on the evolution of speech, music and language. He is a professor at the University of Vienna, Faculty of Life Sciences, where he is head of the Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology.

After receiving degrees in Biology and Medicine (BA) and Cognitive Science (PhD) at Brown University, he held a post-doctoral fellowship in Speech and Hearing Science at MIT and Harvard, then became a lecturer at Harvard in both Biology and Psychology. He joined the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Vienna as a full Professor in 2009, where he co-founded the Department of Cognitive Biology in 2010.

In addition to his scientific interests, Fitch is an avid musician. He sings and plays guitar and percussion, and composes music in many styles.

Since 1999, Stéphane Guétin, a music therapist who holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology, has been focusing his efforts on evaluating the benefits of music therapy by conducting numerous clinical research studies that have been presented at international congresses and published in international journals. In partnership with Montpellier University Hospital (INSERM U1061), MUSIC CARE has developed innovative music therapy and music intervention solutions that can effectively relieve pain, anxiety and depression in hospitalized patients.

Ildar Khannanov earned his PhD and MA in music theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2003, with his dissertation "Russian methodology of music theory and analysis." He is currently the Vice-Chair of Scientific Committee and one of the founders of the Russian Society for Theory of Music, and a member of the Organizing Committee of the European Music Analysis Conference.

Khannanov has been teaching core undergraduate theory and graduate seminars in theory of Russian music in the United States for over fourteen years. His publications include Music of Sergei Rachmaninoff: Seven Musical-Theoretical Etudes (Kompozitor: Moscow, 2011) and articles on theory of formal functions, musical semiotics, and Russian music theory in various international publications.

Stefan Koelsch is Professor of Biological Psychology and Music Psychology at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has Masters degrees in Music, Psychology, and Sociology.

Prof. Koelsch completed his PhD and Habilitation at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig, where he also led an Independent Junior Research Group "Neurocognition of Music". He was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, an RCUK fellow, honorary Hooker Professor at McMaster University, professor for music psychology at the Freie Universität Berlin, and full professor for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at Lancaster University.

His research interests include the neurocognition of music, neural correlates of emotion, music therapy, similarities and differences between music and language processing, and neural correlates of cognition and action. His publications are among the most cited articles in music psychology and the neurocognition of music.

Anna L. C. Wood is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, who from 1996 to 2022 directed the Association for Cultural Equity/Alan Lomax Archive (ACE).

She produced over 100 CDs and box sets published on Rounder Records, one of which won Grammys in two categories, and a set of Haitian music with Harte Recordings, nominated for two Grammys. She and her staff oversaw the digitization, restoration and organisation of her father's recordings, photos, videos, films, papers, and research collections before depositing them at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.

The programs she instituted at ACE include a repatriation of Lomax's field documentation to 60 local communities and regional libraries in the U.S. and abroad; an open access digital catalog of all of Lomax's media; an open access digital library of the world's music (a Global Jukebox); and an Endangered Cultures Initiative to support young culture members in documenting their expressive traditions.

In the U.S. and abroad, Wood researched and published on Greek, Italian, and Spanish music and poetry, social formations and disaster aid and recovery. Her recent book, Songs of Earth: Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music, was published by the University Press of Mississippi. For her work on Italian folk traditions, Anna was made a Knight of the Italian Republic in 1978.

Marina Mahler, granddaughter of Gustav Mahler and Alma Mahler and daughter of sculptor Anna Mahler and conductor Anatole Fistoulari, is a cultural leader and philanthropist dedicated to the transformative power of art.

In 2004, together with Ernest Fleischmann and the Bamberger Symphoniker, she created the Mahler Conducting Competition. Prestigious prize winners include Gustavo Dudamel, Lahav Shani, and Oksana Lyniv, founder of the Ukrainian Youth Orchestra.

In 2010 she founded the Anna Mahler Society in Spoleto, Italy, which gave birth to the Mahler-Lewitt Studios international artist residencies. In 2014, she founded the Mahler Foundation in the US, with the intent to harness the transformative power of art and foster emerging talent across cultural and geographic boundaries.

In December 2021 Marina received the Freedom of the City Medal from the City of Marseille, France.

Dario Martinelli is a musicologist and semiotician, Full Professor of History and Theory of Arts at Kaunas University of Technology, also affiliated to the University of Helsinki as Adjunct Professor in Semiotics and Musicology, and to the University of Lapland as Adjunct Professor in Methodologies of Semiotics and Communication Studies.

He graduated at Bologna University in 1999 under the supervision of Prof. Gino Stefani, and earned his PhD at Helsinki University in 2002 under the supervision of Prof. Eero Tarasti. As of 2023, he has published 15 monographs and approximately 200 studies and scientific articles. His most recent monographs include The Beatles and the Beatlesque (Springer, 2023) and What You See Is What You Hear (Springer, 2020).

A common denominator in his research paths is the theoretical platform called "Numanities", devoted to the rethinking of the role and paradigm of humanities in contemporary society. He has been recipient of several prizes, including a knighthood from the Italian Republic in 2006 for his contribution to Italian culture.

João Carlos Martins occupies a unique place in the Brazilian musical scene, having been considered one of the greatest interpreters of Bach of the twentieth century by international criticism, from which he recorded the complete work for keyboard — a work recorded on 22 CDs in 1998.

Born in São Paulo in 1940, he began his piano studies at the age of eight. His Carnegie Hall concerts, after his twenty-first year debut in a performance sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt, have always sold out. He left the stage as a pianist in 2002 due to physical problems, then returned to concert activity with the help of bionic gloves invented by Ubiratan Bizarro Costa.

He founded the Bachiana Filarmônica, which became the Bachiana Philharmonic SESI-SP — the first Brazilian orchestra to perform at Carnegie Hall (2007) and Lincoln Center. The orchestra has reached approximately 14 million people live. In 2018 he began his most ambitious project — Orchestrating Brazil — which aims to form a thousand orchestras in small Brazilian cities.

Eduardo R. Miranda is a composer and Professor in Computer Music at the University of Plymouth, UK, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR). His distinctive music is informed by his unique background as a classically trained composer and Artificial Intelligence scientist with an early involvement in electroacoustic and avant-garde music.

Miranda is known for his ground-breaking research in brain-computer music interfacing technology and is a pioneer in biological and quantum computing for music. In 2019, his composition Biocomputer Rhythms won two Honorary Mentions at Ars Electronica: Prix Ars Electronica for Artificial Intelligence & Life Arts, and the STARTS Prize of the European Commission.

His music has been performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra and BBC Singers, among other renowned ensembles.

Hélène Nicolet is the director of the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze (IJD), Geneva, the international centre of the Jaques-Dalcroze method. She obtained her Dalcroze Licence in 2006 at the IJD and her Master of Arts in Music Education from the Haute école de musique Geneva in 2008. She studied classical piano and cello.

In 2011, Hélène became a Certified Movement Analyst at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York. In 2013, she completed her Diplôme Supérieur. She has taught in music schools, elementary schools, and for adults and older adults, and is regularly invited to teach abroad. She teaches professional students at the Haute Ecole de Musique Geneva across Bachelor, Master, and certificate programmes.

Trevor Rawbone is a music theorist who combines ideas in theory and analysis with research in the cognitive sciences. He currently works as a music theory consultant, and was previously employed at the AI music software company Melodrive (GmbH), designing modules for adaptive music systems.

He completed his PhD in 2017, investigating harmonic–metrical progressions in Classical music — specifically "butterfly" schemata — drawing on models in music theory, music psychology, and computational musicology. His work demonstrated that these schemata are formed from the constraints of human cognition and its tendency to generate congruent multiparametric relationships.

His work on music analysis, artificial intelligence, and videogame music has appeared in a variety of academic journals and open-access publications.

Iégor Reznikoff is a specialist in ancient music, early Christian chant, and acoustic archaeology, with an interest in prehistoric caves and Romanesque and Gothic churches. His work encompasses architectural and corporal resonance, sound therapy, ethnomusicology, and ancient music practices, and is credited with helping to create new concepts in sound anthropology.

He earned a degree in mathematics from the University of Paris in 1966. He gave his first concerts in ancient Christian chant in 1975, and is today particularly noted for his interpretation of Gregorian chant. He has also worked extensively on resonance in Palaeolithic caves and caverns, and in modern edifices.

Reznikoff has given concerts and performed at international music festivals throughout Europe, the US, and Japan. He had the honour of singing before the Dalai Lama in Zurich in 1991, and in the Shinto ceremonies for the millennium festivities in Kyoto in 2000.

Tomos Roberts (Tomfoolery) is a London-based writer, performance artist and filmmaker. Born in New Zealand to Welsh parents, he studied English Literature & Drama at the University of Manchester, where he co-founded Odds On Productions.

His poem "The Great Realisation" has been viewed over 60 million times across platforms and transcribed into languages from every corner of the globe. The Washington Post described the story behind the poem as one that "captured the hearts of millions."

Tom's mission has been to present messages of hope, optimism, and socially constructive ideas through his words.

Agnieszka Roginska is a Professor of Music Technology and the Vice-Chair of the Music and Performing Arts Professions Department at New York University. She holds degrees from McGill University (B.Mus.), NYU (M.Mus.), and Northwestern University (Ph.D.).

She conducts research in the simulation and applications of immersive and 3D audio, including the capture, analysis and synthesis of auditory environments, and auditory displays. She is the co-editor of Immersive Sound: The Art and Science of Binaural and Multi-Channel Audio.

Agnieszka is a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and served as its President.

Roman Ruditsa is a Russian composer, music theorist, pianist, harpsichordist, music critic and music software developer, and a member of the Russian Union of Composers. His compositional interests are connected with research in harmony and counterpoint, and with the modern continuation of Medieval, Renaissance and Classical music traditions.

He graduated from the Saint Petersburg State Conservatory in 1995 from the composition class of Sergei Slonimsky. In 2014, together with Andrey Bayadzhan, Ruditsa invented the Musical Notation Keyboard and founded D Notation company, aiming to create a perfect digital note-writing tool and develop mass learning of musical literacy.

Daniil Shutko is a Music Theorist and Associate Professor at the Music Theory Department of the St. Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory, and a member of the Russian Society for Theory of Music (OTM).

In 1998 he graduated from the class of Dr. Tatiana S. Bershadskaya at the St. Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory as a musicologist. In 2004 he defended a dissertation on "French Spectral Music: Theoretical foundations of musical language." His scholarly interests include contemporary music, the theory of mode and tonality, harmony, and form in both Russian and Western approaches.

Angela Stoeger is a bioacoustician at the University of Vienna using communication as a tool to investigate animal cognition, with a focus on sound production and perception, vocal learning, and information coding in vocal signals. Her main model species are elephants — highly social mammals that combine a capacity for vocal learning with complex cognitive skills.

She significantly contributed to the field by demonstrating imitative capacities in both African and Asian elephant species. Her research is further interested in the potential evolutionary interconnection of vocal learning with other cognitive skills such as rhythmic entrainment — capacities crucial for human speech and music.

In recent years she has published in high-impact scientific journals, received over €1.3 million in third-party funding as principal investigator, and her research has been reported in more than 100 popular science reports, radio and TV documentaries.

Dmitri Tymoczko is a Professor of Music at Princeton University, where he has taught composition and theory since 2002. He studied music and philosophy at Harvard University, and philosophy at Oxford University, receiving his Ph.D. in music composition from the University of California, Berkeley.

His book A Geometry of Music (Oxford University Press) has been described as "a tour de force" (The Times Literary Supplement) and "a monumental achievement" (Music Theory Online). His article "The Geometry of Musical Chords" was the first music-theory article published in the 130-year history of Science magazine.

Among his awards are a Guggenheim fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, and the Leonard Bernstein fellowship from Tanglewood. His compositions are polystylistic, drawing on genres from the Renaissance to rock, and have been performed by leading ensembles worldwide.

Va Bophary is Chief of Cultural Research at the Royal University of Fine Arts, Cambodia. She earned her master's degree in musicology at Mahidol University, Thailand in 2008. Her research focuses on music for ritual and folk music.

In 2016 she conducted research on the Mé Mot ritual at Kompot province and published the book in 2017. In 2019, Bophary and an American researcher from Pennsylvania State University co-authored the article Forgotten song revived in a living musical culture. In 2021, with support from Cambodian Living Arts, she and a research team conducted research on the musical instrument Phloy in Koh Kong province.

Currently she and her colleagues from the Center for Cultural Research are working on the dance theater "Yike" at Kompot province.

John Warner is the Founder and Artistic Director of Orchestra for the Earth and Music Director at Oxford Opera. A committed advocate of contemporary music, he has been invited to commission and conduct world premieres at the Philharmonie Luxembourg, Het Concertgebouw, and most recently a week-long residency at the Beijing Music Festival.

He honed his craft as assistant to conductors including Sir Simon Rattle, Daniel Harding, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Karina Canellakis, working with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, London Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, and others. He studied music at the University of Oxford, graduating with First Class Honours in 2016.

His pioneering work with Orchestra for the Earth, which he founded in 2017, brings together music and nature, collaborating with leading artists, scientists and charities to raise awareness about the climate and environmental crises. Recent seasons saw him debut with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and BBC Philharmonic.

Called for his "pianistic allure" by Gramophone, Canadian pianist Lucas Wong has earned a diversified career as a performer, teacher, and online musical resource developer. He has performed in prestigious venues across a dozen countries on four continents, with highlights including multiple engagements at Carnegie Hall and innovative recital programmes.

As an educator, Lucas Wong was a founding faculty member at the Soochow University School of Music in China, where he served as piano professor and coordinator for chamber music and collaborative piano. He holds degrees from the University of British Columbia (B.Mus.) and Yale School of Music (M.M., M.M.A., D.M.A.).

Philip Yampolsky is an ethnomusicologist and the founding director of the Robert E. Brown Center for World Music at the University of Illinois. He has been studying the music of Indonesia and its neighbours since 1970, and has played Javanese and Balinese gamelan music for nearly 40 years.

He spent the entire decade of the 1990s recording, editing, and annotating the 20-volume series Music of Indonesia, published by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. His research interests include various genres of Indonesian and West African music, intellectual property issues as they relate to traditional or communal music, and the discography and preservation of early recordings. His research focus since 2011 has been singing traditions in rural Timor.

Lingling Yu is a virtuoso pipa player, maestro of ancient pipa music, and recipient of the Swiss Grand Award for Music in 2016. Born in Hangzhou, China, she began musical studies at age eight. By age thirteen she had won first prize at the entrance examination for the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, and was considered a prodigy.

She obtained her bachelor's degree in Arts at the China Conservatory of Music in Beijing and was appointed as lecturer at Tsinghua University. At twenty-five she won the national competition of Chinese traditional music in Beijing. She studied with master pipa players Dehai Liu, Jieli Luo, Fandi Wang, and Weixi Sun.

Her performing style, combining exceptional mastery of all the techniques of the instrument, is powerful, clear, warm and creative — an encounter between emotion and serenity, blending the two principles of Chinese philosophy: yin and yang. She teaches Chinese traditional music at the Haute École de Musique de Genève.

Konstantin Zenkin, born 1958 in Moscow, is a Doctor of Art Research (1996) and Professor of the Moscow P.I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Since 2009 he is also Vice Rector for Research Activities. He is a founder and vice president of the Society for Theory of Music in Russia (OTM).

His books include Chopin's Piano Miniature (1995), Piano Miniature and Ways of Musical Romanticism (1997, 2nd ed. 2019), and Music – Eidos – Time (2015, English translation 2018). He has authored more than 150 articles and participated in over 300 musicological conferences across Russia, Europe, America, Asia and Africa.

Zenkin is also an active pianist, performing as a soloist and in ensemble across Russia, China, Belgium, Austria, and elsewhere. He serves as Chief Editor of the musicological journal Nauchny Vestnik Moskovskoy Konservatorii.