Sureshkumar Pasupula Sekar

Sureshkumar P. Sekar is a fourth year PhD candidate at the Royal College of Music, London. He is conducting an empirical study on the experience of the audience attending Film-with-Live-Orchestra concerts, an event where a symphony orchestra plays the complete score live in sync with the projection of a full-length feature film. It is a netnographic study conducted entirely using online data: 250 online magazine reviews, and over 2000 Twitter messages posted by the concert audiences.

His first academic video essay entitled “Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concerts: A New Hope” was published in [in]Transition journal and was nominated for the Learning on Screen Awards 2022; it was also polled as one of the best video essays of 2022 in BFI’s Sight and Sound magazine; shortlisted for Adelio Ferrero Award 2022; and won Andrew Goodwin Memorial Prize 2022 (runner-up) awarded by IASPM UK/Ireland. This and other academic video essays of his have been screened at over 25 international academic conferences, workshops, and colloquia: Music and the Moving Image Conference (2022), New York University; BFE-RMA Research Students’ Conference (2021, 2022, 2023); Theory and Practice of the Video Essay (2022), University of Massachusetts, Amherst; International Conference on Music Since 1900 (2022), Royal Birmingham Conservatoire; BARNVirtual—British Audiovisual Research Network Colloquia (2021, 2022); Bremen-Groningen Online Workshops on Multimodality (2022), MCICM Symposium (2021, 2022), Maastricht University, etc.

His research interests are film music, audiovisual culture, audience experience, video essay, intermediality and multimodality, and digital humanities.

He holds an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. He worked as a software engineer for thirteen years before pivoting to researching musical experiences. He is also currently working part-time at the Royal College of Music as a Digital Content Editor for the AHRC project Music, Migration, and Mobility.

Publications

P Sekar, S (forthcoming), Insincere inclusion? Ignorant appropriation? A symphony orchestra plays South Indian film music, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 17(1). 

P Sekar, S (2022), Film-with-live-orchestra concerts: a new hope, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 9(1) [LINK] [Direct link to video essay]. 

Faculties / departments: Research

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