Staff profile

Connor Kirts is a PhD candidate at Durham University studying how we can measure emotional experiences with music. He graduated from the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 2020, with a Bachelor of Arts in Music Technology. In Omaha, he was routinely called upon by community members to facilitate the management of audio-visual production for a wide range of events. He became interested in the psychology of music which brought him to the United Kingdom in 2021 to continue his education. He obtained a Master of Arts in Music Psychology from the University of York in 2022. While in York he produced research regarding subjective musical preferences that he presented at the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition 2023 in Tokyo, Japan. In 2023, he started his PhD candidature in the Music Department of Durham University in the United Kingdom. He is a course representative for PhD students in the Durham Music Department (2023-) and member of Durham's Music Psychology Lab. He has continued to provide production help, albeit now for music psychology conferences, for GAPS2 (2023), NEMuR: York (2023) and now taking on the head technician role for ESCOM12 (2024). In 2024, he ventured to Finland to visit, learn, and collaborate with the research team at the University of Jyväskylä on a project to develop a psychometric measurement tool for emotional experiences with music.