Research

Bristol has a higher concentration of music artists than any other city in the UK, according to a new survey based on studio use.

Research by the music studio platform Pirate used its own booking data to examine the number of bands, DJs and recording artists using its studios relative to overall population.

Bristol came out on top across 16 UK cities and Dublin, with Bradford having the lowest density of artists among the featured cities.

The other top five cities for density were: Norwich, Brighton and Hove, Nottingham, and Liverpool.

Despite a thriving music scene, London was in the bottom five, which Pirate said was "likely due to the higher cost of living in the capital".

Rebecca Mason-Evans, who runs the talent initiative Pirate Residency, said: "Analysing the distribution of artists across the UK underscores the importance of supportive environments for nurturing talent outside of traditional music centres."

Researchers will delve into Portsmouth’s heritage, culture and collections with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for nine PhD studentships.

Portsmouth City Council was awarded the fully-funded PhD studentships as part of the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships programme.  

Researchers from the University of Portsmouth, along with other Higher Education institutions, will work with the city’s museums and archive team to design and co-supervise research projects based on the city’s historic collections, heritage and culture.

“This is a real coup for the city as the programme typically supports national organisations – it shows the strength and depth of our heritage and collections,” said Counsellor Steve Pitt, the Leader of Portsmouth City Council with responsibility for culture.

“This programme will help us uncover new perspectives on the city’s past and help us to share our story and heritage in new and exciting ways.”

Professor Anne Murphy, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Portsmouth, said the researchers’ discoveries “will open up Portsmouth’s amazing heritage and culture to new perspectives and audiences in and beyond the city”.

The council is inviting expressions of interest from Higher Education institutions who would like to collaborate on research proposals, with the first projects projected to begin in October 2024.
 

Falmouth University has been awarded £850,000 in research funding to undertake an immersive archives project capturing Cornwall’s cultural heritage.

The project will use cutting-edge technologies to capture and archive performance practice, exploring new ways to widen access and provide new income streams to support Cornwall’s creative industries.

The funding comes from the AHRC's Creative Research Capability Fund, part of UK Research and Innovation.

GWITHA, from the Cornish word to guard, or to keep, will establish an open centre for immersive approaches to archival practice in the performance space. The project aims to capture and preserve performances that have previously been difficult or impossible to document because of their transient nature. 

Cornwall is renowned for site-specific landscape theatre that is challenging to document and record, making the project particularly relevant in a local context.

The project will employ technologies including augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality, working with artists and performance companies to capture sound and vision in three dimensions.

It will also use the archives housed at Falmouth University to build a digital infrastructure capturing the collections of material objects, textual artefacts and the documentation of performance practice, with a goal of improving access and developing strategies for new income streams from these new digital assets in support of local creative industries.

“We are committed to being the leading university for the nexus of creativity and technology and I can’t think of a project that would encapsulate this better,” said Emma Hunt, Falmouth University Vice Chancellor.
 
Dr Lee Miller, Head of Postgraduate Research at Falmouth University said the project “will allow Falmouth to build a sector leading approach to the capturing, preservation and accessing of resistant archival objects. 

“It will also provide an infrastructure to better capture and share Cornwall’s intangible cultural heritage,” he added.

Traditional craft skills are "on the verge of extinction" in the UK, according to new research.

Five new skills have been added to the "critically endangered" category of the Red List of Endangered Crafts, a research project by the charity Heritage Crafts.

These include straw hat making and encaustic tile making, which join a list of 146 at-risk crafts. Other endangered crafts are Cornish hedging, marionette making, and pigment making.

Researcher Mary Lewis said factors such as the energy crisis, inflation, the pandemic and Brexit had all made matters worse for those working in traditional crafts.

She said: “We know that heritage craft skills operate like an ecosystem; if we lose one part it can have devastating consequences on other parts of the system.

"If we allow endangered crafts to disappear then we seriously diminish the opportunities for future generations to create their own sustainable and fulfilling livelihoods and deal with the challenges of the future.”

The Red List of Endangered Crafts 2023 edition can be viewed online at redlist.heritagecrafts.org.uk.