SOUND, REMEMBERING & REIMAGINING
Meet our Researchers
With a focus on musical dissemination, these projects expand knowledge-building in a South African context through opera, indigenous musical expressions, DJ-ing, film and instruments.
Masters student
Seretse Monei
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
Masters student
Princess Mmakgatla
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
Masters student
Luyanda Mtya
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.
Ph.D. candidate
Anthony Caplin
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
Masters student
Andrea Cole
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?
Post doctorate
Vuyelwa Moyo
This research project explores African music, soundscapes, and sacred spaces as living archives. Drawing on ethnomusicology and ecomusicology, this study examines how sound, music, memory, and embodied cultural practices preserve and transmit indigenous knowledge.
Particular interests include sound and listening as methodologies, community-engaged research, and the relationship between cultural heritage and the natural environment.