London is a complex environment for Knowledge Exchange and cultural and creative interactions. It faces distinctive challenges as it attempts to sustain global competiveness in the Creative Economy, particularly in terms of digital innovation. Creativeworks London builds on the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange (LCACE), a seven year partnership of nine London-based Higher Education Institutions: Birkbeck College, City University, the Courtauld Institute, Goldsmiths College, Guildhall, King's College London, Queen Mary University of London, Royal Holloway and University of the Arts. We will be joined by smaller specialist organisations such as the University of London's Centre for Creative Collaboration, Central School of Speech and Drama, Roehampton, SOAS, Kingston and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and by major cultural organisations such as the BBC, the British Museum,the V&A and the British Library. We will be liaising with the London Mayor's office and the Tech City Investment Company (part of UK Trade and Investment), and UK-wide groups such as the Creative and Cultural Skills Council. We will also be working closely with industry partners, both large and small, including IBM, Playgen/ Digital Shoreditch, Mediaclarity and Bellemedia. This enables the Hub to provide a step-change in the multiple and often fragmented approaches to London's Creative Economy and to provide crucial Arts and Humanities interventions into the sector. Crucially, the Hub will also ensure that the importance of these interventions are widely recognised by business, policy-makers and government. To do so, it will undertake research into London's previous and current attempts to implement creative economy strategies; investigate the special requirements of London's digital economy and the relationship that London's audiences have between the live and the digital experience of performances and artefacts. The Hub's Knowledge Exchange programme focuses on 'Creative Vouchers' where Arts & Humanities researchers will offer a range of services (such as historical information that the Media would like to access, policy overviews, IP advice, digital solutions, alternative approaches to business models or practices) which can be accessed by SMEs. The scheme will also allow us to track the sector's changing needs, feeding back into our research into London's distinctive creative economy. There will also be a 'People Exchange Scheme' for both postgraduate researchers who want to experience industry and entrepreneurs who would benefit from a period of time within an HEI environment. The combination of excellent research and innovative KE will ensure that Creativeworks London provides a strategic overview and network support. This will be essential if London, and hence the UK, is to cultivate entrepreneurial capacity and facilitate new routes to markets in inter-related fields such as digital media, music, fashion and the visual arts.

This strategic partnership was based on years of collaboration of several European conservatoires where the music master programme for New Audiences and Innovative Practice (NAIP) was developed and implemented. The partnership also included new partners, which had in the years before the start of the project witnessed the progress of the NAIP programme and thus gained interest in its methodologies and ideology. This partnership project consisted of several events over two years period aimed at further development, improvement and promoting of methodology and joint curriculum using mobility in the form of two intensive study programmes, three working groups, two joint staff training events and two periods of staff development. The core of the NAIP programme is creative collaborative learning, where mentoring and practice based research play a major role. The aim is to be a platform for professional integration, entrepreneurship, creative collaborative practice, cross-arts and cross-sector practice and community engagement within the domain of higher education. This is particularly relevant as the music world is increasingly in need of more variety of skillful and flexible musicians capable of relating to society and finding new roles and carriers, at the same time as traditional employment opportunities are less and less accessible. The programme calls for creative musicians who have achieved a high standard of performance and show strong potential of entrepreneurship, leadership and communication skills. This project has strengthened the foundations of developing and promoting creative collaborative learning with enhanced quality, utilizing cross border collaboration and extensive dissemination and thereby making way for greater relevance of higher music education in Europe and beyond.

Singing is receiving growing attention in both popular culture and academe as an activity that offers numerous benefits for wellbeing (Clift, 2012) throughout life. From the participatory arts events offered by leading arts organisations like the LSO to community choirs and singing initiatives for people affected by social or health issues, there have never been so many opportunities to join in. However, many adults exclude themselves from singing. About 17% of people self-define as 'tone deaf' (Cuddy et al 2005) and probably many more as 'non-singer'. Non-singers often feel regret and social embarrassment (Knight 1999), holding negative associations and beliefs about their own singing ability and voice (Numminen 2005). Many, though not all, sing less well than average adults (Wise & Sloboda 2008). Against a discourse of 'anyone can sing', non-singers hold a powerful narrative that says 'you can either sing or you can't - and I can't'. The project focuses on people who are disenfranchised from singing, engaging them in specially designed intervention programmes. It combines psychological, educational and artistic research to give an integrated understanding of the journeys adult non-singers take in learning to sing, and the ways in which they can be supported. Although there is ample evidence that singing skill is open to improvement, there is little research on how this happens. While we know that non-singers' self-image and confidence can be improved by supportive opportunities (Richards & Durrant 2003), knowledge is limited about how these changes, along with improvements in skills, are related to specific learning activities and contexts. Meanwhile, the professional craft knowledge of singing teachers, who often report success in teaching those with singing difficulties, is largely undocumented. Psychological research in laboratory settings has elucidated the role of pitch and melody processing in vocal pitching. The ability to sing in tune has little to do with pitch perception per se and more to do with the complex co-ordination of perception and action. Recent evidence suggests one important aspect of this co-ordination may be auditory imagery - the ability to imagine music in one's mind. This offers an exciting point of contact with practice, since imagery is widely used in singing teaching. The project will integrate hitherto rather separate areas of research and practice, and move beyond pitch accuracy as the primary measure of 'good' singing to reflect the multifaceted nature of singing as a means of expression and communication. Based at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, the project mobilises the expertise of specialist teachers, music psychologists, a software designer and a composer-animateur. It is organised into two strands. Strand 1 is a singing course including individual tuition and group sessions, as well as a final performance produced collaboratively by the participants and teachers. It will include repertoire chosen to suit the singers and original material created under the leadership of a composer-animateur, based on participants' reflections on their own singing journeys. Participants in Strand 2 undertake training in the privacy of their own home. A mobile app will be designed to train auditory imagery and a controlled experiment will test whether this improves singing skills. If successful, an app offers huge potential for a scientifically validated self-help tool. The project will apply a battery of measures before and after training to investigate how adults progress in the many dimensions of singing skill, and how their self-views and attitudes towards singing change. It will also collect video data and qualitative accounts of the learning process, to identify the types of educational approaches, musical materials and activities that are associated with measurable developments in skill and with satisfying artistic, social and personal experiences.

Doctoral Training Partnerships: a range of postgraduate training is funded by the Research Councils. For information on current funding routes, see the common terminology at https://www.ukri.org/apply-for-funding/how-we-fund-studentships/. Training grants may be to one organisation or to a consortia of research organisations. This portal will show the lead organisation only.

This practice-led research project continues the work started by Liam Byrne during an Artist Residency at the V&A in Summer 2015, focusing on the viola da gamba, a string instrument widely used between 1500-1800 but now, apart from specialist historically informed performance, largely a museum-piece. This project will examine in detail the two most productive strands of what little viola da gamba performance does still take place - creating new music for an old instrument and experimenting with alternative performance contexts for historical repertoire. It offers a case study addressing not only the dormancy of the nation's major musical instrument collections but also broader questions surrounding the museum's emerging role as a performance space, the conservatoire's urgent need to relate to new audiences and performance contexts, classical music's role in public culture, the creation of widely communicative and genuinely 'performable' electronic music and the dissemination of music generally in the digital age.