Adam Ockelford
TiME Consultant
Adam is Professor of Music and Director of the Applied Music Research Centre at the University of Roehampton in London. With a group of parents and friends, Adam founded The Amber Trust in 1994.
Adam has had a lifelong fascination for music, as a composer, performer, teacher and researcher. While attending the Royal Academy of Music in London, Adam started working with children with special needs - a number of whom, he noticed, had special musical abilities too - and he became interested in how we all intuitively make sense of music, without the need for formal education. Adam pursued this line of enquiry, and gained a PhD in music at Goldsmith's College in London in 1993, in which he set out his 'zygonic' theory of musical understanding. This theory has proved a valuable tool in music theory and analysis, in investigating musical development, and exploring interaction in music therapy and education.
Adam is Secretary of the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research ('SEMPRE'), a previous Chair of Soundabout, an Oxfordshire-based charity that supports music provision for children and young people with complex needs; and founder of The AMBER Trust, a charity that supports visually impaired children in their pursuit of music.
Adam's research interests are in music psychology, education, theory and aesthetics - particularly special educational needs and the development of exceptional abilities; learning, memory and creativity; the cognition of musical structure and the construction of musical meaning. He welcomes enquiries from PhD students with any of these or related areas of interest.
He has worked with young people who are blind or partially sighted for over the last 35 years, at Linden Lodge School in Wandsworth and the RNIB, and has researched and written widely on how visual impairment affects children’s developing musicality. Adam’s longest-standing student is Derek Paravicini, with whom he has worked since 1984, when Derek was just five years old.