Sam Duffy

Sam's research interests include music education, social music making and how technology can be used to transform these interactions. Her doctoral studies examined student-tutor interaction during one-to-one instrumental music lessons, and how this interaction changes when the lesson is remote, mediated by video communication technology. She has also worked as a researcher on the music app Steve Reich’s Clapping Music and at the UCL Knowledge Lab (part of the UCL Institute of Education) on the EU funded research project WeDraw, investigating digital multisensory learning environments to support exploration of spatial mathematical concepts by primary school children in mixed ability classrooms. Sam was the first Centre Manager for the Royal College of Music centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music PRiSM.

An Alumni of the Media and Arts Technology doctoral training programme, Cognitive Science Research Group and Music Cognition Lab at Queen Mary University of London. Sam is also a qualified chartered accountant (ACA ICAEW) with an MBA from London Business School and a saxophonist, specialising in contemporary big band jazz.

She joined the Academy in April 2023 in the new post of Research Officer.

Selected Publications

See https://qmul.academia.edu/SamDuffy for a full listing.

Duffy, S., & Pearce, M. (2018). What makes rhythms hard to perform? An investigation using Steve Reich’s Clapping Music. PLOS ONE, 13(10), e0205847.

Price, S., Duffy, S., & Gori, M. (2017). Developing a Pedagogical Framework for Designing a Multisensory Serious Gaming Environment. 1st ACM SIGCHI International Workshop on Multimodal Interaction (MIE’17), 1–9.

Duffy, S., & Healey, P. G. T. (2017). A New Medium for Remote Music Tuition. Journal of Music, Technology and Education, 10(1), (pp. 5–29).

Duffy, S. (2015). Shaping Musical Performance Through Conversation. Doctoral Thesis. Queen Mary University of London.

Duffy, S., & Healey, P. G. T. (2014). The Conversational Organisation of Musical Contributions. Psychology of Music, 42(6), 888–893.

Duffy, S., & Healey, P. G. T. (2013). Music, speech and interaction in an instrumental music lesson: An ethnographic study of one-to-one music tuition. In M. Orwin, C. Howes, & R. Kempson (Eds.), Language, Music and Interaction (pp. 231–280). Book chapter. London: College Publications. ISBN 978-1-84890-124-7

Duffy, S., & Healey, P. G. T. (2013). Using Music as a Turn in Conversation in a Lesson. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2231–2236). Berlin: Cognitive Science Society. ISBN 978-0-9768318-9-1.

Duffy, S., & Healey, P. G. T. (2012). Spatial Co-ordination in Music Tuition. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1512–1517). Sapporo: Cognitive Science Society. ISBN 978-0-9768318-8-4.

Duffy, S., Williams, D., Stevens, T., Kegel, I., Jansen, J., Cesar, P., & Healey, P. G. T. (2012). Remote Music Tuition. In Proceedings of 9th Sound and Music Computing Conference (pp. 333–338). Copenhagen.