The PhD in Creative Music Practice provides an opportunity for candidates to pursue practice-led research in the field of music at the highest level.

The PhD in Creative Music Practice involves research that combines textual and musical outputs. For example:

Composition
Performance (either of original or pre-existing repertoire)
Installation
Sound design
Interactive music software, etc.
The outputs take the form of a portfolio, performance, and/or recording, as well as theoretical work and documentation of the processes by which the music was made (e.g. video, photographs, recordings, sketches, studies, web pages).

The musical outputs are explicitly linked to the textual material. This linkage may take various forms: musical material might exemplify, contextualize, and/or expand an idea elaborated in the text, and vice versa.

The programme requires candidates to critically evaluate and articulate the relationship of textual to extra-textual media in the formation of musical knowledge. The format of the PhD thesis consists of a text of not more than 50,000 words and a comprehensive record of the musical material (recordings, scores, software etc.) contained in a coherent and archive-able format (bound thesis and/or CD/DVD). In the case of theses relating to live musical performances, documentation in the form of high quality audio and video recordings is central to the submitted materials.