KMH

The Royal College of Music in Stockholm educates musicians and music teachers at the highest international level. KMH traces its roots back to 1771, and has recently moved into a modern campus area—the music college of the future. We preserve our musical heritage, and at the same time we are constantly developing.

Music Research
Music is a major field of knowledge and research area, relevant to a number of disciplines. KMH aims to be a center for interdisciplinary research in music and music education in Sweden.

Externally funded, national and international research projects and a higher seminar for research in music, are important parts of our research environment. We are actively working on developing research-driven teaching.

The artistic and the scientific research areas cross-fertilize each other while at the same time affecting so many other research areas and can contribute to the development and improvement of, among other things, human health, well-being and learning. In addition, research in music can contribute to the development of new technical solutions, products and insights.

KMH’s strategic areas for research are:
Music as Artistic Performance
Music Education
Music and Health
Music and Technology
Music and Entrepreneurship

Artistic research in Music
“Artistic research in music contributes to in-depth insights and renewal in musical creation and widening of music as a social phenomenon and expression”.
Henrik Frisk, professor in music and responsible for the research collaboration with KTH

Artistic research in music gives the musician – in a broad sense including all professional music practice – the ability to acquire knowledge that can be applied both in an artistic field and in a broader context, based on its special skills.

An artistic research work can be a part of both methodology and results and include an imaginary process, in which intuition, craftsmanship, collaboration and contextualization are included and collaborate.
Musical research can affect, for example, interpretation and analysis of musical works, behavioural practices and historical contexts. Artistic research in music has, in addition to the purely artistic perspectives, been used to investigate issues such as health, gender equality/gender, technology development, psychology, human-machine interaction and creative collaborations.

The emergence of artistic research
That artistic expressions and artistic practice have a knowledge dimension that is comparable to other areas of knowledge is now an established thought in Sweden. Since the beginning of the 21st century there has been artistic research in most artistic disciplines, and this research is often interdisciplinary by nature.

Music is one of the largest, and also oldest, subjects in the field, and the methodological and theoretical dissemination is now relatively large.

Research education with a focus on artistic research has been conducted since the 1990s and in 2010, Sweden received a doctorate in artistic research.

Scientific Research in Music
Research in music has also generated the interdisciplinary research subject music education, which studies all forms of musical learning, including frameworks, prerequisites, traditions and conditions governing situations where music forms the content of learning processes.

The starting point for problem solving is the context in which music is included in upbringing, education or teaching.

Another field in the music education research at KMH is music therapy.