Nicolas Bougaïeff is a Canadian-born, Berlin-based artist and researcher whose work bridges electronic dance music practice and musicological inquiry. He holds a PhD from the University of Huddersfield, where he was also a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, and currently directs the Berlin Academy of Electronic Music, where he mentors electronic music producers. His current performance and production practice centres on polytemporality, the systematic use of tempo modulation, polyrhythmic structures, and tuplets within electronic dance music contexts. He developed pivot mixing, a systematic approach to tempo modulation in electronic dance music; his ongoing research explores the formal and expressive potential of tempo networks. He has performed at Berghain, fabric, and MUTEK. His artistic output includes releases on Mute and NovaMute, notably the EP Cognitive Resonance (2017) and the album The Upward Spiral (2020).
Javier Campos is an honorary professor in the Department of Music at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), and a member of the editorial board of the journals Popular Music and Society and Cuadernos de Etnomusicología. He holds a double degree in History (UAM) and Professional Musicianship (Real Conservatorio de Madrid), as well as a PhD in Musicology (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, UCM). His research interests encompass popular music, ethnomusicology, and sound perception studies. Among other scholarly collaborations, in the last years he has participated in two extensive research projects on popular music (at the UCM—Department of Music—and at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa—Institute for Ethnomusicology). Campos has devoted a special attention to the complex interaction formed by the contemporary search for identity and the (seemingly) universal principle of religion, within the performative reference frame of popular culture. This synergistic phenomenon has had important manifestations and social impact around the broad category of rock music. As a result, Campos has published several works on this area of research.
Caro (Caroline) Cooke is a DJ, music practitioner, and researcher working across musicology, cultural policy, and accessibility. Their research focuses on access in the music industry across education, professional practice, and venue contexts. They use qualitative, participatory, and policy-analysis approaches to examine how organisational structures shape inclusion and participation in music spaces. They hold a BA in Music and Popular Music Studies from the University of Liverpool and an MA in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Klisala Harrison works as Associate Professor of the Anthropology of Music at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her activist-theoretical research and articles have focused on music’s relationships to inequalities of climate change impacts, health and well-being, and poverty. During recent years, she has done field research in the Arctic (Greenland and northern Europe). Her book Music Downtown Eastside: Human Rights and Capability Development through Music in Urban Poverty (Oxford, 2020) won the 2021 International Association for the Study of Popular Music-Canada Book Prize and 2021 IASPM Global Book Prize Special Mention.
Lisa Heywood is the Access Coordinator at the charity Drake Music, which works at the intersection of music, disability, and technology. They have a background in Science Communication, but their work has crossed over into the arts at many junctions. They have held a variety of roles, including as a presenter, workshop facilitator, project manager, and events organiser. Lisa also has considerable experience as a folk dance teacher, where they continue to work on developing an inclusive and reflective practice. Across their work Lisa has championed inclusion and accessibility, informed by their lived experience as a queer person with mental health conditions.
Gemma Nash was a sound artist and researcher based in Manchester. Her work focused on re-imagining the ‘othered’ body and the complex relationship between medicine, disability, and ethics. Her pieces include spoken word narratives, drum and bass tracks and eerie and seductive soundscapes using voice, synthesisers, DAWs and hacked controllers. She came to sound art though being a laptop DJ and VJ mixer. As a disabled artist with Cerebral Palsy, she was particularly interested in researching the way people experience, access, make, and think about music and sound art. Gemma Nash died in 2025.
Maria A. G. Witek is Professor of Music Psychology at the Department of Music, University of Birmingham, UK. Before taking on this post, she worked at the Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University and the Royal Academy of Music, Denmark. She holds a DPhil in Music from the University of Oxford, an MA in Music Psychology from the University of Sheffield and a BA in Musicology from the University of Oslo. Her research addresses the psychology, cognitive neuroscience and cognitive philosophy of musical rhythm, body-movement and affect, using methods such as brain imaging, motion-capture, physiological recording, participatory and qualitative methods, and phenomenological and music analysis. She was previously PI on the AHRC funded project ‘Embodied Timing and Disability in DJ Practice’ and co-I on the ‘Augmented Reality Music Ensemble’ project, funded by the EPSRC.
