Dr D Ferrett

Associate Professor in Music, Sound and Culture

Dr D Ferrett is Associate Professor of Music, Sound and Culture and the Research Lead for the Academy of Music and Theatre Arts (AMATA). She is a theorist publishing in sound and music studies, and a vocalist with a musical background based in improv, post-punk, noise pop and blues music. D currently leads the BA (Hons) Popular Music and the BA (Hons) Music degrees as well as teaches across the undergraduate programmes with a modular focus on music, culture, reality-virtuality and futurist philosophy. 

D develops work that investigates the relationships between categories of human and the non-human, gender, technology, mythology and the environment primarily through voice and sound (as practice and theory) drawing from an interdisciplinary approach that engages voice studies, sound studies, new materialism, feminism, critical musicology, literature studies and ecocriticism.

D is the author of Dark Sound: Feminine Voices in Sonic Shadow (Bloomsbury, 2020), a monograph that critically analyses misogyny and racism within music and sound discourse as it manifests in the deployment of dark feminine archetypes and stereotypes. In the book and in work that has followed, D’s research proposes that philosophy and radical ideas about being, space and time can be derived through deep listening to music and sound and its imaginative potential; she is particularly interested in music and sound that embodies ‘dark’ themes and speaks of and to the entanglement of individual lived experience and political, cultural and environmental crisis.  

Prior to Falmouth, D was an active participant in the Leeds DIY music scene and studied media, music and cultural studies, graduating with a PhD from the University of Leeds where she taught and edited the international peer-review journal parallax. Since arriving at Falmouth University, D has edited the IASPM journal, joined the first Royal Musical Academy Popular Music Study Group and is actively engaged in developing EDI policy within the university, including as Chair of the Gender and Equality Working Group, and, more recently, as part of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Group.

D is currently working on two intersecting projects that pertain to Cornwall: ‘Dark Kernow’ - as derived from Dark Sound and exploring the relationship between gender-mythology-environment in terms of Cornwall; Voices on the Edge: Women+ and the Cornish Music and Sound Ecology - a project that seeks to amplify and promote women and gender expansive music and sound-makers who are based in Cornwall.

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