Dr James Dooley

Professional biography

I joined the Open University as Lecturer in Music Technology in July 2020. I am currently Module Team Chair for A232 Music, sound and technology, as well as Music Qualifications Lead. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and have taught across a wide range of areas in music and music technology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Prior to my appointment at the Open University, I completed a PhD in Music Composition at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (2016), where I was also Lecturer in Music Technology from 2017 to 2020. 

I am active as a composer and performer of electronic music, and have presented my work at festivals and venues internationally, including Slingshot Festival (USA), Longyou Grottoes International Festival (China), InSonic (Germany) and Supersonic Festival (UK). As a live electronics musicians, I have worked with and supported performances for a wide range of composers and ensembles, such as Jonathan Harvey, Robert Ashley, Philipe Hurel, The BBC Symphony Orchestra, The Philharmonia Orchestra and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

Examples of my compositions and performances can be found at: https://formuls.co.uk/

Research interests

My practice-based research focuses on the development and application of novel interfaces for the composition and performance of electronic music. Currently, I am developing a digital musical instrument (DMI) that examines ways in which musicians can easily control complex sound synthesis and sound manipulation through the use of touchscreen interfaces. This raises a number of research questions, such as what barriers exist between musicians and technology, what musical interface design considerations need to be addressed when creating new DMIs, and how can both affordances, perceived and hidden affordances, be catalysts for creative exploration? In trying to answer these quesitons, my research has begun to recognise how DMIs more broadly exhibit biases about their creators and users, encasing ideas and assumptions about musical practice and cultural norms within the design of their interfaces.

I supervise PhD students and welcome enquiries from potential candidates.

Current doctoral candidates:
Daniel Brew: "Expanding Idiomatic Electric Guitar In Contemporary Music"

Recently completed PhD theses:
Joe Wright (2019): “The Design of Exploratory Sonic-Play Instruments With Non-Verbal Young People on the Autistic Spectrum”
Balandino Di Donato (2020): “Designing embodied human-computer interactions in music performance”
Niccolò Granieri (2020): “Augmenting the experience of playing the piano: controlling audio processing through ancillary gestures”
Johan Eriksson (2020): Automatonism: towards dynamic macro-structure in generative music for modular synthesisers”
Alexandros Drymonitis (2023): “The Artists who Say Ni!: Incorporating the Python programming language into creative coding for the realisation of musical works”