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Staff profile

Overview

Dr Eamonn Bell

Assistant Professor

Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science+44 (0) 191 33 44947
Associate Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study

Biography

Eamonn Bell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests fall under the broad umbrella of the digital humanities, and include:

  • the application of mathematical and contemporary computational techniques to solve problems in musicology, music theory, and the humanities;
  • the history of the computational sciences and digital technology, particularly as it relates to musical production and consumption in the twentieth century;
  • identifying and lowering barriers to accessing digital research infrastructure (DRI) supporting computationally intensive research by non-specialists (particularly in the humanities).

Since 2019, his research has been funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Irish Research Council, and a number of smaller institutional grants. He is most recently involved in the design and delivery of several DRI projects serving UK-based arts, humanities, and culture researchers. These initiatives include Toward a Collaborative Computational Project (CCP) for Arts, Humanities, and Culture Researchers (CCP-AHC) (as Project Lead), Accelerating Digital Skills for Music Researchers (as Project Lead, funded initially as Accelerating embedded computational analysis of Web data about music in UK universities), and Digital Skills in Arts and Humanities (DISKAH): Transforming Access to Digital Infrastructure and Skills (as Project co-Lead).

He teaches across the CS curriculum at Durham. He has lectured on introductory algorithms and data structures, instructed software engineering group projects, and co-designed and now co-teaches a new elective module on music processing. He has also been involved in the supervision of final-year projects, taught master’s theses in business analytics, and doctoral research on a variety of topics.

Before coming to Durham, he was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Music, Trinity College Dublin. There, he examined how the once-ubiquitous Compact Disc (CD) audio format was designed, subverted, reproduced, and domesticated for musical ends. This project was supported by the Irish Research Council under the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship programme for the period 2019–2021 and continues at Durham. A short audio production marking the 40-year history of the audio CD was prepared (with Rachel Smith), drawing on original interviews with people involved in the production of optical media within and beyond the UK.

He holds a PhD in Music Theory from Columbia University (2019), where he wrote a dissertation on the early use of digital computers in the analysis of musical scores under the supervision of Joseph Dubiel. At Columbia, he taught primarily in music and digital humanities. He designed and taught a course on the critique of “digital music” (2018), and was instructor of record for undergraduate sections in the core curriculum course on history of Western music for non-musicians (2018) and the fundamentals of music theory (2017). Shortly before he began graduate studies in music at Columbia, he graduated from TCD with a joint honours degree (a “two-subject moderatorship”) in Music and Mathematics (2013).

Eamonn is accepting research students (master's and doctoral level). To make an initial inquiry, please email (a) an up-to-date version of your CV and (b) a short, 150-word project proposal (including relevant references). 

Research interests

  • digital humanities
  • digital musicology
  • history of technology

Publications

Chapter in book

Conference Paper

Journal Article

Presentation

Supervision students

Ningxiang Xie

Postgraduate Student