"Khyal: Music and Imagination" builds on fundamental research into the ways in which Indian musicians and audiences experience and imagine classical vocal performance, using its insights to generate new kinds of engagement and creativity. The project brings together, first of all, musicians, ethnomusicologists and visual artists to explore the khyal genre and stimulate the artists to produce original works of visual art inspired by the music and by existing interview material. This new artistic production in turn facilitates new forms of engagement accessible to a wide range of people: in schools, at concerts and festivals, and at museums and galleries. In the first instance we will bring together a diverse group of people into a project team: visual artists based in both the UK and India, ethnomusicologists, and performing musicians. We will discuss findings of our earlier research, particularly as it relates to the moods and emotions expressed in the music and the role of visual imagery in both performance and listening. Artists will be introduced to our extensive collection of audiovisual recordings and interview transcripts, from which relevant source material will be selected. They will be commissioned to produced original artwork in media of their choice (e.g. paintings, video installations) inspired by this material. While this work continues, we will run a series of school workshops with a local arts organisation with a strong track record in this area, Gem Arts, in the course of which school children too will be encouraged to engage with the idea of music and visual imagery and to produce their own art works. At the same time, we will develop a simple interactive app which allows users to engage with audiovisual recordings of Indian music. All of these elements - original research materials, interactive app, professional and school children's artwork - will be combined in a public exhibition presented at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. We will also give public presentations drawing on this material at other venues, including the Darbar Festival in London, the UK's largest festival of Indian music. The aim is to increase engagement with this genre of music and with the interface between music and visual arts more generally, to facilitate new forms of creative engagement amongst school children, and to foster dialogue between academics and creative artists.

The North East of England is home to numerous and diverse South Asian communities. These are defined by geographic origin (e.g. Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and the many regions within these areas), religion, and other social and historical factors. Within these communities music often plays a key, but complex role. It is an activity around which individuals build networks, and a medium through which communities make their culture audible to themselves and the wider community. Music's significance, though, may be double edged. It can be a vehicle through which to reach out to other communities; equally it may be a way of turning inwards - a symptom of resistance to connection, or an assertion of difference. Communities (South Asian, other minority ethnic, and white) can come into meaningful contact through music and other arts - but how is this fostered, beyond the occasional public event? How can both the local and global significance of such cultural forms be communicated and understood beyond their ethnic origins, and how might these shape new imaginings of a society of multiple - and possibly multiply connecting - cultures? The scoping study proposed here seeks to review existing bodies of literature germane to these and other questions, from such fields as ethnomusicology, urban musicology, cultural studies and sociology. It also draws on the expertise of organisations that already have much practical experience in representing and supporting South Asian and other minority ethnic communities. These include arts development organisations such as Gem Arts, Kalapremi, and Saarang - Arts and Culture, which, alongside The Sage Gateshead, a further Project Partner, have substantial experience of community engagement. With a view to an eventual larger, practically engaged project (in effect a piece of interactive fieldwork), this review aims to scope out some of the key issues and essential methodologies - both interrogating the existing scholarly and theoretical literature, and drawing on the significant practical experience of arts oranisations whose concern is with (or includes) South Asian music. Our key research questions include: * In what ways do South Asian musics act as a vehicle for articulating identity and for fostering and connecting communities - including connections with 'majority ethnic' society? (Conversely, how might musical differences reinforce cultural ones?) * How could this potential be further developed, and what role could arts organisations and educational institutions play in this? How can organisations better interface with one another? * What is the impact of such factors as class, religion, gender, race, ethnicity, and histories of migration in shaping communities, and in both facilitating and impeding connection between them? * To what extent can music (and other art forms) serve to cut across such factors (and to what it extent might it reinforce them)? * How, in these contexts, should we understand such terms as 'network' and 'community', and how might the one strengthen the other? *To what extent are answers to the above relevant to other minority ethnic communities, and to broader understandings of multiculturalism? In this investigation we will collaborate with arts development organisations by means of structured interviews and workshops. We will share our various types of expertise with the intention of further developing strategies for impact on - or, perhaps better, agency with - communities and groups who seek greater cultural and social connectivity through music and other arts. Our outputs, in addition to the literature review, will include conference presentations, at least two peer reviewed articles, and an action plan for future engagement between our own HEI, communities and arts organisations.