Dr Michelle Phillips
PhD (Cantab.), SFHEA, ACA (she / her)
X (Twitter) handle: @___Michelle___
RNCM staff profile: Michelle Phillips - Royal Northern College of Music (rncm.ac.uk)

Short biography

​

Michelle is a Senior Lecturer in Music Psychology and Head of Enterprise (Academic) at the Royal Northern College of Music (Manchester, UK). Her research interests include audience response to live and recorded music, neurological response to music listening, music and time, perception of contemporary music, entrepreneurship, and music and Parkinson’s. Michelle’s research on ‘what makes live music special?’ was recently featured in UK Research and Innovation’s series ‘101 jobs that change the world’. Recent publications include a co-edited volume entitled ‘Music and Time: Psychology, Philosophy, Practice’. Michelle founded the Music, Audiences, Neuroscience, Cognition and Society (MANCS) research centre, which is a collaboration between scholars at the RNCM, University of Salford, University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University. Michelle gives regular invited talks nationally and internationally, most recently at the Association of British Orchestras (Leeds, UK) and Orchestras Now! (Wrocław, Poland) conferences. She is an Associate Editor for the journal Psychology of Music. Michelle completed her PhD (funded by a Domestic Research Studentship awarded by the University of Cambridge) under the supervision of Professor Ian Cross, Centre for Music and Science, University of Cambridge.

​

Michelle was recently Principal Investigator of the £1million StART Entrepreneurship Project. Michelle is a trustee of the Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE) and a Fellow of Enterprise Educators UK (EEUK).

​

Michelle has appeared on BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, ITV News, BBC News online and ITV Granada Reports. She recently worked with the Science and Industry Museum on their ‘Turn It Up: The Power of Music’ exhibition.

​

Michelle is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and Chair of the RNCM Research Ethics Committee. She set up and leads the RNCM Music Psychology Reading Group. Michelle is also a saxophonist (http://www.equinoxsax.org.uk/) and chartered accountant, and is fluent in German.

​

​

Extended biography

 

Michelle completed her PhD with Professor Ian Cross in the Centre for Music and Science at the University of Cambridge, following a Bachelor's and Masters by Research degree (funded by the AHRB, now AHRC) at the University of Nottingham. Past and current consultancy work includes external examiner roles at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, Bath Spa and the Open University, and consultancy for AdvanceHE’s Degree Standards project. Michelle was also a consultant for the Academy for Musicology and Musicianship Amsterdam (AMMA) project, and is currently an advisor on the AHRC-funded Networked Innovation in Classical Music project, led by SPARC and the Maastricht Centre for Innovation in Classical Music (MCICM), with the aim of to bringing together classical music researchers, practitioners and audiences in seven cities across the UK, The Netherlands and Austria. She is also part of the Live Well and Dance with Parkinson's network in Greater Manchester.

 

Over the last 6 years, Michelle has received over £1million in funding for her research on various projects. Michelle has received research grants for work on music and earworms (awarded by the AHRC), behavioural, neurological and physiological response to live and streamed music performance (awarded by the Centre for Cultural Value), and music and Parkinson’s (awarded by SEMPRE). From 2020 - 2022 she was Principal Investigator for the StART Entrepreneurship Project, funded by a grant of £902,153 from the Office for Students and Research England and with partner institutions Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and University of the Arts London.

 

Michelle feels passionately about working with, and sharing, research with everyone, and actively seeks opportunities to disseminate research not only in scholarly journals, but also in other forms, such as blogs (e.g. these two Science and Industry Museum blogs on her work on music and time: 'Can Music Make Your Life Feel Longer?' and 'Can Music Make us Time Travellers?'). She has discussed her research with various groups of people, from the late Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh, to an audience interested in the science behind the TV show Doctor Who. Michelle wrote a show about music and acoustics (‘Good Vibrations’) for families which was staged as part of the University of Cambridge Science Festival in 2011, and an RNCM Family Day in 2016, she has worked with primary school children to develop a play about music and time, and she has been invited to present at public science events in Edinburgh ('Harmonic Function'), London and Manchester. Michelle regularly runs music and science experiments with museum visitors (for example as part of the Science Museum London’s ‘Live Science’ programme, and a ‘Platform for Investigation’ family day on musical earworms at the Science and Industry Museum, Manchester) and has acted as a gallery consultant for these museums, and the Moscow Science Museum, for their music and science exhibitions. Michelle has featured on Russian TV discussing UK research in music and science, and was invited by ITV to appear on the news to discuss ABBA’s summer 2020 announcement of their new album. Michelle has hosted multiple live and live streamed concerts at the RNCM, for example as part of their #LiveFromTheRNCM series in Autumn 2020.

 

Michelle regularly presents at national and international conferences, and is invited to give keynote talks and talks as part of university research fora. She publishes her work in journal articles and book chapters (see list below). Michelle acts as a journal article reviewer for journals including Psychology of Music, Music and Science, and Musicae Scientiae, and has been involved in running conferences including ESCOM 2015 and SysMus (she remains part of the SysMus Council). She was invited to be part of the organising committee for the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) Music in Maths conference which took place in July 2022.

 

Michelle teaches various subjects within the field of music and science, including music acoustics, music perception, music and time, and applied music psychology. She supervises Masters projects and PhDs, and currently has 5 PhD students. Michelle also teaches subjects linked to her accountancy expertise, including tax, budgeting, project management, and entrepreneurship. Michelle is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

 

From 2019 - 2022 Michelle was Chair of MusicHE, the UK’s subject association for music. Michelle is a qualified chartered accountant, having trained with KPMG in Leeds and London. She has previously held voluntary accountancy roles with the charities KJV Community Children’s Choir and Ladder to the Moon. In 2021 she was elected a trustee of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE). Michelle is a saxophonist with the Equinox Saxophone Ensemble.