Research interests
The overriding theme of my research and practice-as-research activity is the ‘poetics of recorded music’. All my work, whether practical creative outputs or scholarly publications, is concerned with how new music is made collaboratively and with some form of technology. Outputs include scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and interview pieces as well as recordings, broadcasts, and performances of original works. My work is both research and practice-as-research in which critical, conceptual, philosophical issues are explored from intellectual, creative and practical perspectives. The ideological implications of self-imposed constraint and the multiplicity of simultaneous resonances are the two most recurrent issues at stake in my work. As my work focusses on process, my musical outputs tend not to fit into neat stylistic categories of genre. Instead, my work is equally experimental in nature as it can be commercially oriented.
Postgraduate supervision
Dr Slater welcomes applications for PhD research in the areas of composition, production, the aesthetics and poetics of record production, and collaborative creativity.
Completed PhDs:
- George Marshall, Constraint and Creative Decision Making in the Composition of Concert Works, Film and Video-game Soundtracks (composition)
- Brice Catherin, Transmission Strategies and Blossoming Participants in My Composed Music (composition)
- Stuart McCallum, Making Music in the Real World: a Professional Practice Portfolio with Reflective Commentary (composition & production; 2020)
- Lewis Kennedy, Functions of Genre in Metal and Hardcore Music (musicology; 2018)
- Jamie Moore, Robert Glasper's Black Radio: Issues of Style and Identity, University of Hull, 2017 (performance element).
- Rowan Oliver, Rebecoming Analogue: Groove, Breakbeats and Sampling, University of Hull, 2015 (2nd supervisor).
- Niall Thomas, How Has the Development of Technology Influenced Recorded Heavy Metal, University of Hull, 2015 (2nd supervisor).
- Adam Martin, Music Producers in 21st Century Britain: an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, University of Hull, 2014
- Sandy Clark, The Siren: Towards Accessibility in the Composition of a Multimedia Episodic Opera (composition)