Susan Boyle plans for musical

Susan Boyle plans to star in a musical about her life.

The Scottish singing sensation, who shot to worldwide fame after appearing on UK TV talent show Britain's Got Talent in 2009, is in talks to have her meteoric rise to fame chronicled in a new stage production and even hopes to take the lead role in the show.

She said: "I'm definitely going to be on stage. I'd rather that than having to sit watching people up there looking like me.

"I want to be doing the music parts, so I'll be coming in and out of the show. I'm looking forward to doing some live work. It'll be really nice to see so many of the people who have supported me in person."

Producers are reportedly planning to take the show - which will chronicle the 49-year-old star's modest upbringing in Blackburn, West Lothian, her period living alone with her cat and her rise to stardom - on a huge UK tour late next year as they believe it will be extremely popular.

A source told The Sun newspaper: "Susan has incredibly loyal fans. People will be travelling from all over the world to see her perform in her own musical.

"I wouldn't be surprised if some of them book tickets to watch it five nights in a row."

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Tracing musical style through technology

Aberdeen academics will employ the techniques of DNA sequencing to look at how music has changed over the centuries.

They are part of an international team successful in securing a £100,000 grant from the Digging into Data project, which supports researchers using computational techniques to change the nature of humanities and social sciences research.

Dr Frauke Jurgensen, a lecturer in music at the University of Aberdeen, will lead the Aberdeen team, working alongside academics from Canada and the USA, to study changes in musical style from 1300 to 1900.

They will employ computational techniques, including those more commonly used in genetics research, to pinpoint transitions in musical style which could ultimately change the way in which we appreciate and perform music from this era.

Dr Jurgensen will focus on Renaissance music, analysing the changes in musical chords and melodic motions using advanced music information retrieval techniques.

She said: “As a singer I have a strong interest in music from a performance perspective, and if you are going to perform or even listen to music then you have to understand it.

“Modern audiences are not going to be familiar with much of the music we are looking at, since we subconsciously build up an understanding of the music we normally listen to.

“Much of the music we are investigating deserves to be performed, and we hope that by developing our understanding of the way it is constructed, we can help modern audiences and musicians to connect to it.”

Dr Jurgensen will use the digitised collections of several large music repositories, including the music of Palestrina and his contemporaries, to extract answers as to how the styles of the composers differ.

She will work with Professor George Coghill, Head of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen and Dr Ian Knopke from the BBC, with Dr David Smith, Head of Music at the University of Aberdeen, acting in an advisory role.

“The collections we are looking at extend to thousands of pieces and if you were to attempt this kind of analysis by hand it would take many years.

“By using digitised data we are able to use pattern matching techniques similar to those in DNA sequencing to look at both similarities and differences in the music.

“We will be able to pinpoint the way in which a composer writes a piece of music that makes it different from another composer from the same period.

“This way of looking at music should help us to understand not only how this older music works, but also affects our understanding of newer music, which is underpinned by similar concepts.”




NEWS BY:http://www.abdn.ac.uk/news/details-11607.php