Professor Nicola Dibben BSc, MA, MEd, PhD, FHEA
Department of Music
The University of Sheffield
Jessop Building
34 Leavygreave Road
Sheffield
S3 7RD
Tel: +44 (0) 114 222 0480
Fax: +44 (0) 114 222 0469
email : n.j.dibben@sheffield.ac.uk
Biography
Professor Nicola Dibben is the author of Björk (Equinox Press, 2009) and co-author of Music and Mind in Everyday Life (OUP 2010). Her research into music, mind and culture has also been published in over 40 book chapters and journal articles, presented at conferences worldwide, and features in the international media.
Professor Dibben is Director of Research in the music department. She teaches at all levels on the science and psychology of music, and on popular music studies, and has supervised seven doctoral students to successful completion. As part of the teaching team for Sheffield’s innovative and long-running programmes in Psychology of Music, she has taught over 150 Masters students. In 2003 her particular interest in widening participation in Higher Education lead to a research project funded by PALATINE.
Professor Dibben’s research involves consultancies and collaborations with commercial organizations. She is currently collaborating with Björk, contributing to her ground-breaking multi-media project Biophilia – the first music album to be released as a suite of apps. Previous research for commercial organizations includes a project investigating music and driving safety for Privilege Insurance.
Professor Dibben is joint co-ordinating editor of the journal Popular Music, a consulting editor to Musicae Scientiae, Music Perception, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies, and she co-organised the 2009 international Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology. She is external examiner of the MLitt Popular Music Studies programme at the University of Glasgow, and was previously external examiner of the BA in Music and MA Popular Music Studies at the University of Liverpool. She is a member of the REF2014 Panel for Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts.
Professor Dibben gained Bachelors and Masters degrees in music at City University, London, before reading for a PhD at the University of Sheffield in 1996. She was appointed to a lectureship in music at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne before taking up a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Dr Dibben joined the Music Department at Sheffield as a lecturer in 2000, and subsequently completed the MEd in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education for University Lecturers. Visiting lectureships include the Institüt Musikwissenschaft, Karl-Franzens University, Graz, Austria. Past academic collaborators include Prof. Eric Clarke (University of Oxford); Prof. Nick Cook (University of Cambridge); Dr Eduardo Coutinho (Centre for Affective Sciences, Geneva); Dr Alexandra Lamont (Keele University); Prof. Richard Parncutt (Karl-Franzens University, Graz).
Research Interests
- Music and emotion
- Contemporary popular music
- Perception and cognition of music
- Applied music psychology (uses of music in work settings, while driving...)
- Teaching and learning in Higher Education
View Nikki Dibben's Research page
Current Projects
- A collaboration with Björk. Providing musicological expertise to Björk and One Little Indian Records. This includes documenting Björk’s new project, “Biophilia”.
- Perception of emotion in speech prosody and music. In collaboration with Dr Eduardo Coutinho we are investigating the way in which perception of emotion in music draws on the same acoustic cues as speech.
- Auditory perception of the virtual sound world of recordings. This interdisciplinary project explores why and how we hear recorded pop songs as expressive, drawing on musicological research into expressive performance, the sociological and cultural study of celebrity, the psychology of emotion, and theory and research from psychoacoustics and ecological psychology into the perception of sound sources and environments.
Selected Grants
- The Music of Björk (2006): AHRC Research Leave Scheme, £35,816.
- Music in working environments (2005): AHRC Small Research Grant, £5,000.
- The influence of socio-economic background on teaching and learning in music in British Higher Education: PALATINE (LTSN subject centre), £3,000
- Perception of similarity relationships in music, in collaboration with Dr Lamont, Psychology department, Leicester University (1999): AHRB, £4,000.
Selected Publications
Clarke, E., Dibben, N. & Pitts, S. 2010. Music and Mind in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dibben, N. 2009. Björk. London: Equinox Press.
Dibben, N. & Williamson, V. 2007. An Exploratory Survey of In-Vehicle Music Listening. Psychology of Music, 35, 4, 571-89.
Dibben, N. 2004. The role of peripheral feedback in emotional experience with music. Music Perception, 22(1), 79-116.
Cook, N. & Dibben, N. 2001. Musicological approaches to emotion. In Music and Emotion: Theory and Research Eds. P. Juslin & J. Sloboda. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.45-70.
Dibben, N. 2001. Pulp, pornography and spectatorship: subject matter and subject position in Pulp's 'This is Hardcore'. Journal of the Royal Music Association, 126, 1, 83-106.
Dibben, N. 1994. The cognitive reality of hierarchic structure in tonal and atonal music. Music Perception, 12(1), 1-25.