Joseph Coughlan-Allen completed his PhD at the University of Liverpool. His thesis was titled ‘Buzz, hiss, crackle, clunk: consequential sounds of music technology in music recordings, their meanings and roles’. His research interests centre around the interpretation of sound and music, and particularly around the sounds that lie on the cusp of musicality but nevertheless contribute to musical meaning.
Stanley Ralph Fink teaches music theory and composition at Drake University; he previously taught music theory at James Madison University. His research on an innovative formal design, ‘Embellishing the verse-chorus paradigm: Max Martin and the descant chorus’ was published in Musical Waves: West Coast Perspectives of Pitch, Narrative, and Form (2020). In addition to harmony and form in popular music, his research interests include the organization of pitch and the role of expectation in twentieth- and twenty-first century opera. His article, ‘Benjamin Britten's musical characteristics of the madwoman in Curlew River’ is forthcoming in the Journal of Music Theory. He holds a PhD in music theory and composition from Florida State University, where he was a Legacy Fellow. A trained pianist, he served as répétiteur and pianist for the Princeton Festival's opera productions from 2011 to 2019.
Sophie Frankford is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Economic, Judicial and Social Study and Documentation in Cairo. She holds a DPhil in Anthropology (University of Oxford), an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies (University of Oxford) and a BMus in Music (King's College London). She is interested in popular culture in the Middle East, with a focus on music in Egypt. She has taught at the University of Oxford and the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and her research is forthcoming in the journals Ethnography and Égypte Soudan Mondes Arabes.
Richard Osborne is Associate Professor in Music and Creative Industries at Middlesex University. He is the author of Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record (2012) and Owning the Masters: A History of Sound Recording Copyright (2023), and co-editor of Mute Records: Artists, Business, History (2018) and Music by Numbers: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in the Music Industries (2021). He has co-authored reports on Music on the Blockchain (2016), Music Creators’ Earnings in the Digital Age (2021) and Rights Reversion and Contract Adjustment (2023).
Dave Russell retired from the former Leeds Metropolitan University as Professor of History and Northern Studies in 2010. He is now an independent scholar. An historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular culture, his interests fall in the fields of music, sport and the role of culture in constructing notions of northern English identity. Publications on music include Popular Music in England, 1840–1914: A Social History (1997, second edition), as well as essays and articles on the brass band movement, militarism in Victorian music hall, the emergence of the Edwardian variety industry, cabaret clubs in 1960s England, sport and music, popular listening cultures, the history of the music profession, and British opera singers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current research centres on the cultural history of the guitar and other fretted instruments in twentieth-century Britain.
