The BFE Podcast Team are:

• Dr Natalie Hyacinth, BFE Podcast Project Lead

Dr Natalie Hyacinth is a composer and academic creating and thinking about music at the intersections of technology, climate justice and Black life. Natalie’s artworks are intersectional and interdisciplinary, inspired by diverse sonic fields such as free jazz, hip hop, dub and electronic music, while drawing upon conceptual themes from Afrofuturism, Philosophy and Cultural Geography, to Black Studies, Ethnomusicology and Aesthetics. Experimenting with sounds and sonic technologies as a form of defiance and resistance, Natalie seeks to create new sound worlds as part of her activism, a creative practice she explores under the name The Black Astral.

• Matt Dicken (Bath Spa University), BFE Podcast Producer

Matt Dicken is a final year PhD student and lecturer in ethnomusicology at Bath Spa University. His current research focuses on the Paraguayan polka. As Student Liaison Officer for the BFE, Matt has a strong interest in developing opportunities and visibility for student ethnomusicological research. He also has expertise recording and producing a wide range of musical projects and is a guitar teacher in Bristol.

• Thomas Graves (Durham University), BFE Podcast Manager

Thomas Graves holds a degree in Popular Music from the University of Kent and a master’s degree in Ethnomusicology from SOAS, University of London. He is currently a PhD candidate at Durham University studying musical emotion and qawwālī. His primary research interests lie in musical emotion, particularly in relation to lyrics, social context, and religion. His approach is multidisciplinary, with the aim of using ethnographic knowledge to inform psychological research in musical emotion, as well as adapting quantitative methods from music psychology to the ethnographic field.