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Simon Brown

HE Lecturer

Nottingham School of Art & Design

Role

Simon lectures in Music Production, Sound Engineering, and Audio Production at the Nottingham School of Art & Design. Having studied Music at The University of Nottingham, Simon gained his PhD from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and is now a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Society of Arts.

Career overview

Prior to joining Nottingham Trent University in 2018, he held a position at the Royal College of Music in London and published research on digital musicology and the experience of listening to music. He has presented conference papers and delivered talks both nationally and internationally, including at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, the Royal College of Music, the University of Manchester, The Open University, the Cheltenham Music Festival, and the British Library.

His performance career spans extensive engagements throughout the UK, Europe, and the United States, involving studio, television, and orchestral work. He has performed double bass with the COMA Ensemble and the Nottingham Symphony Orchestra, and in 2010, he was accepted into the official Warwick Basses Endorsing Artists programme.

In addition to his role at Nottingham Trent University, he serves as Director of Education at the Music Learning Collective (MLC). He is also an Associate Lecturer and Honorary Associate at The Open University, where he teaches both their undergraduate and postgraduate music courses throughout the UK.

Research areas

Simon's principal research interest concerns the experience of music listening, exemplified by his work on the Listening Experience Database (LED). This collaborative endeavour was led by The Open University, the Royal College of Music, and—during its second phase—the University of Glasgow. The project secured two Arts and Humanities Research Council grants: £0.75 million (2012–15) and £0.98 million (2016–19).

The main objective of LED was to develop a publicly accessible database that consolidates diverse accounts of music-listening experiences, spanning any genre, historical period, or cultural context. Two key elements of its methodology involved the use of Linked Data and crowdsourcing, enabling widespread participation in gathering data. The most recent phase of the project, titled “Listening and British Cultures: Listeners’ Responses to Music in Britain, c.1700–2018,” adopted a more specific historical and cultural lens. Nevertheless, the database—launched in December 2013—continues to welcome submissions documenting listening experiences from any era, geographic region, or musical tradition.

Prior to this, Simon’s doctoral research investigated performance practice, with a particular emphasis on Benjamin Britten’s work as both pianist and conductor. Examination of Britten’s performance scores—held at the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh—revealed rich and often revelatory annotations that he made in preparation for performances and recordings. Notably, his markings in selected Mozart works offer deep insight into questions of musical interpretation. These materials thus illuminate the interpretive processes relevant to performers, conductors, and composers, and they permit comparative analysis of the conductor’s intentions, as evidenced by the annotated scores, against actual performances captured in surviving recordings. A significant portion of this research has directly contributed to the ongoing cataloguing of Britten’s life and work at the Britten-Pears Library. Ultimately, this research aims to contextualise Britten’s accomplishments as a performer within the broader cultural and historical milieu of his era, thereby clarifying his significance in this domain.

External activity

Sponsors and collaborators

  • Nottingham Business School
  • University of Nottingham
  • University of Derby
  • The Open University
  • Nottingham City Council
  • Nottinghamshire County Council
  • HAL Leonard
  • Lâg Guitars
  • Marshall Amplification
  • RSL Awards

Publications

Brown, Simon (2019). ‘#AreYouListening: Mining Social Media to Collate People’s Listening Experiences’ in Helen Barlow and David Rowland (eds). The Experience of Listening to Music: Methodologies, Identities, Histories. Milton Keynes: The Open University. https://ledbooks.org/proceedings2019

Brown. Simon (2017). ‘Analysing Listening Experiences: A Case Study of the Young Benjamin Britten’ in Helen Barlow and David Rowland (eds). Listening to music: people, practices and experiences. Milton Keynes: The Open University. https://ledbooks.org/proceedings2017

Brown, Simon; Barlow, Helen; Adamou, Alessandro and d'Aquin, Mathieu (2015). The Listening Experience Database Project: Collating the Responses of the "Ordinary Listener" to Prompt New Insights into Musical Experience. The International Journal of the Humanities: Annual Review, 13 pp. 17–32.

Adamou, Alessandro; d’Aquin, Mathieu; Barlow, Helen; and Brown, Simon (2014). LED: curated and crowdsourced Linked Data on Music Listening Experiences. Proceedings of the 13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2014), Riva del Garda, Italy Oct 1, 2014.

Brown, Simon; Adamou, Alessandro; Barlow, Helen and d'Aquin, Mathieu (2014). Building listening experience Linked Data through crowd-sourcing and reuse of library data. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1145/2660168.2660172

Brown, Simon (2014). Listening Experience. The Journal of the British Universities Film and Video Council, Vol 95, pp. 6-7.

Press expertise

  • Listening to music
  • Performance practice
  • Music Education Industry
  • Benjamin Britten

Course(s) I teach on