Dr Dave Camlin

Dave Camlin's musical practice spans performance, composition, teaching, socially-engaged music practice and research. A singer/song-writer by trade, his work is motivated by the idea of music making as a creative resource for fostering kinship and living more sustainably, as a potent form of civic imagination.

His research explores the relationship between aesthetic and participatory traditions of music making, and suggests that music is about the ‘performance’ of human relationships as much as it is the performance of musical ‘works’. His research focuses on group singing, music health and wellbeing, musician education, music and virtuality and Community Music (CM). Dave has pioneered the use of Sensemaker® ‘distributed ethnography’ as a method for research into cultural phenomena.

Dave leads a number of community choirs in the Natural Voice (NVN) tradition, and won the National Trust’s Outstanding Achievement Award in 2019 for an AHRC/Arts Council England funded mountain-top singing project, The Fellowship of Hill and Wind and Sunshine. He was a trustee of the NVN from 2015-19 and co-chair of the March Network’s Special Interest Group (SIG) in singing and mental health 2019-21. Dave lives in Cumbria in Northern UK, leads many outdoor music events, was founding director of music organisation SoundWave, and a co-founder of the Solfest and Cumberlandia music festivals.

Dave is a LAHP (London Arts & Humanities Partnership) doctoral student supervisor, currently supervising the work of Florence Brady.

Selected publications

Camlin DA (2024), What does it mean to sing with the Earth? Music Education Research, 26(3), 209-222 [DOI].

Camlin DA (2023), Music Making and Civic Imagination: A Holistic Philosophy, Intellect [ISBN 9781789388022].

Camlin DA (2022), Encounters with participatory music, in M Dogantan-Dack (ed.), The Chamber Musician in the Twenty-First Century (pp.43-72), MDPI Books [DOI].

Camlin DA and Lisboa T (2021), The digital ‘turn’ in music education (editorial), Music Education Research, 23, 2, 129-138 [DOI].

Camlin DA, Daffern H, & Zeserson K (2020), Group singing as a resource for the development of a healthy public: a study of adult group singing, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7, 60 [DOI].

Camlin DA and Zeserson K (2018), Becoming a community musician: a situated approach to curriculum, content, and assessment, in B Bartleet and L Higgins (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Community Music (pp. 711–733), Oxford University Press [LINK].

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Faculties / departments: Research, Academic staff