Collaborations
Social Acoustics develops experimental forms of interdisciplinary research through collaborations across faculties at the University of Bergen
Main content
Project Leaders
Jill Halstead is a professor at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen. She gained a PhD in music from Liverpool University, UK, in 1995 and has published in the field of gender and music and popular music cultures, in addition to practice-led research disseminated through performance and film. As a teenager, Jill taught herself to play the guitar and devoted quite a lot of time to playing extremely loud rock music. Over the years she has worked in alternative and popular music as a performer, director and composer. From the mid 1990s she specialized in collaborative devised performance projects, often created over short periods of time, on location with various groups and communities. Recent work includes soundscore compositions for a series of screendance pieces and live dance performances tackling the social stigmatization around aging and loss.
Brandon LaBelle is a professor at the Art Academy, University of Bergen. As an artist, writer and theorist he works with issues of sound, culture, voice and questions of of agency. He develops and presents artistic projects and performances within a range of international contexts, often working collaboratively and in public. He is currently working on a long-term artistic project, The Other Citizen, exploring modes of self-organized citizenship today. He is also an affilated professor at the Autonomia Akadimia in Athens, and a member of the The Imaginary Repulic.
Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design
Wolfgang Schmid is an associate professor at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen. He is a musician and music therapist working with questions of participation, self-organization and processes of change in music improvisation with people affected by neurological conditions and terminal illness. He works as music therapy practitioner and researcher at the Sunniva Centre for Palliative Care at Haraldsplass Deaconess Hospital in Bergen. More recently he began to pioneer the implementation of music therapy as ecological and spatial practice in palliative care in Norway. Applying participatory research approaches he explores qualities of silence and embodied listening with dying persons, their families and professional caregivers, conceptualizing listening as a way of being-with others in the very last period of life.
Simon Gilbertson is an Associate Professor at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen. After foundational training in music performance, ethnomusicology and composition he qualified as a music therapist in 1993. Since then he has worked as a therapist, researcher and educator in clinics and universities in England, Germany, Ireland and Norway with children and adults with unique developmental and health biographies. He is convener of Materializing Care: An international cross-professional network.
Xueli Tan is an Associate Professor of Music Therapy at the Grieg Academy Music Therapy Research Centre at University of Bergen. Prior to her current appointment, she was the Presidential Research Fellow at the School of Music, University of Iowa (USA). For more than 20 years, Xueli worked as a clinical and research music therapist in various parts of the United States. Her clinical work included the use of music therapy for pain management on a burns/trauma intensive care unit in Cleveland, Ohio (USA). Other music therapy experiences included clinical and research work in post-surgical units, oncology, psychiatry, and with children and adults with disabilities. Her areas of research focus included music therapy in medical contexts, pain management, music preference and perception, cultural humility and responsiveness in clinical practice, and research design and analysis.
Anna Helle-Valle is a clinical psychologist and associate professor at GAMUT - the Grieg Academy Centre for Music Therapy at the University of Bergen, where she works with POLYFON to create and support music therapy research and practice for elders. Her PhD is a critical and reflexive exploration of children's restlessness, and was carried out at the Grieg Academy. She is currently specialising in general and community psychology, and works in the Department for nursing home medicine in Bergen Municipality. Most recently she has become the founder and director of Last Chapter - a late life festival, that will take place in June 2021. The festival aims to triangle research, the arts and heath care services in order to provide a new space for reflection and action related to late life.
Faculties of Psychology and Medicine
Karsten Specht is a cognitive neuroscientist and Professor at the Centre for Biological and Medical Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Bergen. His main research focus is on auditory perception of speech and music, connectivity and plasticity of the language network, clinical multimodal neuroimaging, and rehabilitation from speech and language disorders. He us also the head of the Bergen fMRI group, and he also holds a guest professorship at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, Norway.
Anders Bærheim is a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care University of Bergen.
Faculty of the Humanities
Margery Vibe Skagen is an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures University of Bergen. Her doctoral thesis, in French literature, focuses on the poetics of melancholy in Baudelaire’s writings. Main research interests are French 19th century supernaturalism, literature and medical history, literature and science.
Sveinung Sundfør Sivertsen is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bergen. With Ragnhild Nabben he is director of Fremtenkt a social enterprise company based in Bergen. Fremtenkt develops innovative programs for students and the unemployed and problem solving workshops for private and public companies.
Rasmus T. Slaattelid is Professor at the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, University of Bergen. His research interests include evidence-based policy, the philosophy of the Humanities and scientific visualisation.
Kari Anne Klovholt Drangsland is a PH.D candidate at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender Studies, University of Bergen. She graduated as a human geographer from the University of Bergen (UiB) in 2007. Her Ph.D-project is part of the umbrella-project "Waiting for an uncertain future: the temporalities of irregular migration" (research council of Norway). Her empirical focus will be on temporality related to irregular migration in the German migration-hub of Hamburg. In 2007, she co-founded the Centre of Urban Ecology (CUE) in Bergen (www.byokologi.no). CUE works with issues related to migration and urban development, and conducts projects at the intersection of art, architecture and research.
NORCE - Research Institute
Karin Mössler is a music therapist at Bergen culture school and a senior researcher at the Grieg Academy Music Therapy Research Centre, NORCE. Working with children with autism in both research and practice, she is interested in how interactions are shaped, understood and contextualized by ways of moving, sounding and emoting. Influenced by psychodynamic thinking, group analysis, developmental psychology, early infant interaction and embodiment she is interested in designing studies that can create knowledge on how engaging in music can strengthen attunement, bonding, belonging, identity and community.
Kjell Morten Stormark is a Professor at Norce and Leader of the Regional Centre for Child and Youth Mental Health and Child Welfare
Methodology
The project conceptualizes inquiry as a continuum of synergies which enable cross-fertilization across the traditional dichotomies of art and science.
