Our Researchers
Current Projects
Andile Bishop
Masters student
My research explores how African marimba music may be taught more effectively by combining traditional oral pedagogy with structured audio-visual tools.
It investigates how recordings, visual guides, and practice-based methods can support both teachers and students, using a practice-led, multi-method approach within real teaching environments.
The study aims to preserve indigenous musical knowledge while improving accessibility, consistency, and scalability. Ultimately, it positions audio-visual resources as a bridge between cultural tradition and contemporary education.
Anthony Caplan
Ph.D. student
This PhD comprises a portfolio of three original compositions with accompanying analyses, exploring the theme of inner transcendence. The works trace a progression from universal archetypal ideas, through culturally grounded expression, to a personal spiritual synthesis.
The central opera, The Moon Prince – Inkosana Yenyanga, is supported by The Earth, rooted in African instrumental and vocal traditions, and Cosmic Essence, a choral work for voices and strings. Together, they reflect an integration of African and Western musical practices within a unified conceptual and creative framework
Andrea Cole
Masters student
This interdisciplinary film-project contrasts industrial fashion systems with everyday regenerative practices such as garment mending and reuse and is centred around my deaf grandmother, a former garment worker.
Through practice-led research it aims to amplify decolonial and intersectional sensory embodied knowledge through a personal documentary about fashion and the environment drawing on sensory ethnography, sound studies, and autoethnography.
The film makes use of environmental sound, silence, and sign language to challenge dominant visual and verbal storytelling traditions and aims to answer the question: How could soundscapes convey embodied sensory environmental knowledge in a personal documentary film?
Seretse Monei
Masters student
This research project explores decentralisation as a performance methodology, focusing on what happens when the performer is decentered as the primary visual focus in live music performance. It takes the form of a practice led case study consisting of two recitals, interviews, and written reflection.
Traditionally, our attention is directed toward a fixed focal point such as the stage, the performer, or the conductor, where vision organises how we listen.
This project asks what happens when that visual anchor is removed, but vision itself remains. Audience members still see the space and each other, but without a single point of visual focus
Vuyelwa Moyo
Ph.D. student
Luyanda Mtya
Masters student
This study explores the performance and social history of house music culture in Mdantsane, Eastern Cape, post-apartheid South Africa. The study positions house music as a social practice through which identity, urban creativity, memory, and belonging are developed.
As both a researcher and DJ, I employ autoethnography, social historiography, and ethnographic techniques to document and analyse how performance functions as a self-expression and a form of memory-making.
The study adds to African music studies and Ethnomusicology studies by foregrounding local music practices as significant sites that create social meaning, identity, belonging, and alternative developments of cultural knowledge.
Kuhle Ngqezana
Masters student
This research project explores how podcasting can function as a method of ethnomusicological documentation, with a focus on the Afroloops series developed through the International Library of African Music.
Situated at the intersection of media studies and ethnomusicology, the project examines how digital audio practices enable new forms of engaging with archival materials, oral histories, and indigenous musical knowledge. Key to the study is its multilingual approach, which positions language as both a methodological tool and a means of expanding access.
By working across languages, the project seeks to bridge the gap between institutional archives and broader communities, reactivating sound as a living, participatory form of knowledge.
Nkosinathi Ntuli
Ph.D. student
This project investigates the automated detection, classification, and retrieval of marine intertidal sounds from Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) at urban and natural sites along the Eastern Cape coastline.
Using Computer Vision, Convolutional Neural Networks trained on spectrograms, the system distinguishes marine natural sounds (waves, soil, air pressure and wave crashing), geophony (water flow). Integrated Explainable AI (saliency maps, SHAP) visualises decision drivers, enabling ecological validation.
A content‑based retrieval engine indexes spectrogram embeddings, allowing rapid similarity searches and efficient cataloguing of large acoustic datasets. The end‑to‑end pipeline provides scalable, real‑time monitoring to support biodiversity assessment, and tracking of human activities in coastal ecosystems.
Princess Mmakgatla Sathekge
Masters student
This study investigates the role of sound in the repatriation and reburial of Khoe and San ancestral remains, examining how museums and communities work together to rehumanise remains, restore dignity and memory, and promote healing.
Sound is understood broadly here to include chants, prayers, songs, instrumental music, dirges, crying, ululation, drumming, clapping and rhythmically embodied movement.
This will be achieved through analysis of recordings made of the welcoming ceremony held at Iziko Museum, interviews with participants on their experiences of sound in the process, and further participant observation at official ceremonies as remains are returned to the Northern Cape for reburial in early 2026
Amahle Shosha
Masters student
This project creates an original radio drama addressing a social issue in South Africa. As the encoder, it will shape the sound design, dialogue, and performance to convey specific messages and emotions. The drama will be performed live to an audience, broadcast on Rhodes Music Radio, and available as a podcast.
This combines the immediacy of live performance with broader digital reach, aiming to spark conversation and social change. Drawing on Zakes Mda's work on storytelling's role in shaping public opinion, this project will test live radio's power to overcome traditional theatre's limitations and reach diverse audiences.