SURESHKUMAR P. SEKAR
Researching Audience Experience, Audiovisual Culture, Audiovisual Essays
Sureshkumar P. Sekar is a fourth year PhD candidate at the Royal College of Music, London. He is conducting an empirical study on the experience of the audience attending Film-with-Live-Orchestra concerts, an event where a symphony orchestra plays the complete score live in sync with the projection of a full-length feature film. It is a netnographic study conducted entirely using online data: 250 online magazine reviews, and over 2000 Twitter messages posted by the concert audiences. His research interests are film music, audiovisual culture, audience experience, video essay, intermediality and multimodality, and digital humanities.
Education & Career
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2023 – Digital Content Editor at Royal College of Music for the AHRC Project Music, Migration & Mobility
2019 – PhD Candidate at the Royal College of Music, London
2017 – 2018 – Masters in Creative Writing (Biography and Non-fiction) at the University of East Anglia, UK
2004 – 2017 – Software Engineer [Cognizant Technology Solutions, Tata Consultancy Services, MindTree Ltd.]
2000 – 2004 – Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering (National Institute of Technology, Trichy)
Awards & Recognition
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Royal Music Association’s (UK) Small Research Grant 2023
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Royal Music Association’s (UK) Small Research Grant 2022
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“Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts: A New Hope” polled as one of the best video essays of 2022 in BFI’s Sight and Sound magazine.
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Andrew Goodwin Memorial Prize (runner-up) by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) UK/Ireland for the video essay “Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts: A New Hope”
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Shortlisted for the Adelio Ferrero Award 2022 (Italy) for Best Video Essay (“Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts: A New Hope”)
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Nominated for the Learning on Screen Awards 2022 (UK) for the video essay “Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts: A New Hope”
Publications
2023
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Insincere Inclusion? Or Ignorant Appropriation? — A Symphony Orchestra plays South Indian Film Music,
Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 17(1).
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/msmi.2023.4
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Open Peer-Review of the Academic Video Essay “@Concert: Liveness in the Time of Coronavirus” by Landon Palmer,
[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 10(1).
http://mediacommons.org/intransition/concert-liveness-time-coronavirus
2022
Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts: A New Hope,
[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 9(1).
http://mediacommons.org/intransition/film-live-orchestra-concerts-new-hope
Conference Papers
2023
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Insincere Inclusion? Or Ignorant Appropriation – A Symphony Orchestra plays South Indian Film Music.
International Conference of Multimodality, UCL, London.
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aLiveness and Audiovisualisation of Orchestral Music.
RCM-LAHP Symposium of Doctoral Music Research, Royal College of Music, London.
Screening + Concert = Screencert: Introducing a typology of Screen-based concerts.
Music and the Moving Image Conference, New York University, New York.
Insincere Inclusion? Or Ignorant Appropriation – A Symphony Orchestra plays South Indian Film Music.
BFE-RMA Research Students’ Conference, Northumbria University, Newcastle.
2022
aLiveness. The Bremen-Groningen Online Workshops on Multimodality. Online.
aLiveness. Grieg Research School (GRS) Autumn Course. University of Bergen, Bergen.
Insincere Inclusion? Or Ignorant Appropriation? — A Symphony Orchestra plays South Indian Film Music.
British Audiovisual Research Network Colloquia.
aLiveness. Theory & Practice of the Video-Essay, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Liveness and aLiveness in Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts. Live Cinema IV: Live Xinema, University of Nottingham, Nottingham.
Audience Experience in Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts: Towards a Theory of aLiveness.
12th Biennial International Conference on Music Since 1900, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham.
Liveness, aLiveness, and Audiovisualisation of Orchestral Music.
Society for Musicology in Ireland Plenary Conference, University College Cork, Ireland.
Insincere Inclusion? Or Ignorant Appropriation? — A Symphony Orchestra plays South Indian Film Music.
Music and the Moving Image Conference, New York University, New York.
Liveness, Aliveness, and Accessible Audiovisualisation of Orchestral Music. Borderlands: Classical Music and Society, Maastricht Centre for the Innovation of Classical Music, Maastricht University, Netherlands.
Moving on from Liveness to aLiveness: Applying Intermedial Theory to Orchestral Music. British Audiovisual Research Network Colloquia.
Audience Experience in Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts: Towards a Theory of aLiveness. Joint SMI and ICTM-IE Postgraduate Conference, Dublin City University, Ireland.
Moving on from Liveness to aLiveness: Applying Intermedial Theory to Orchestral Music. BFE-RMA Research Students’ Conference, University of Plymouth.
2021
Audience Experience in Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts: Towards a Theory of aLiveness. Towards 2040: Creating Classical Music Futures, Maastricht Centre for the Innovation of Classical Music, Maastricht University, Netherlands.
Staging Popular Media Music: Inclusion, Immersion, Invigoration, and Interaction in Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts. Staging Popular Music: Researching Sustainable Live Music Ecologies for Artists, Music Venues and Cities, Erasmus University, Rotterdam.
Mixed Me-search Methods: Combining Auto-Biography, Auto-Netnography, and Auto-Ethnography. Transcending Boundaries in Qualitative Research, NVivo Global Virtual Conference.
“An audience member’s a performer too”: Towards a theory of aliveness. International Symposium on Performance Science, Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal.
Audience Experience in Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts: Towards a Theory of aLiveness, British Audiovisual Research Network Colloquia.
Liveness, aLiveness, and Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts. Doctoral Showcase Event, Royal College of Music, London.
Self-isolation: Ethics, and Extraction of the Self, in Auto-Netnography. Information Overload? Music Studies in the Age of Abundance, University of Birmingham, Birmingham.
Audience Experience in Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts: Towards a Theory of aLiveness.
BFE-RMA Research Students' Conference, University of Cambridge, Cambridge.